Every picture tells a story, the adage goes.

Recently, eight Hawley School fifth graders considered that saying when they were asked to document a typical day at their school for The Bee. Over the past few months, Rachel, Kaitlin, Laura, Julie, Andrea, Jenna, Tricia, and Jina have been regulars on our Education pages, filling the Hawley School column with the latest news from the kindergarten through the fifth grade. After a while, however, they wanted a new challenge, something to complement their reporting.

Finding enough cameras to use, they struck out across the school to tell the story of Hawley. Free to photograph whatever they wanted, they were given three guidelines: shoot from different perspectives, seek out those instances that define a given part of a day, and find candid moments.

From the symbolic morning pledge, to a random act of kindness on the playground during lunch and two tired teachers heading out into the afternoon sunshine after a long day, we think they managed to do just that. The scenes in these photos are what any of us could expect to behold during a stroll through Hawley’s halls on any given day. That was, of course, the point.

Every day, scores of moments occur in our schools that comprise the small acts of a maturing play. They happen, and then they are gone, like a student’s pause at a water fountain on her way to class. Luckily, these eight Hawley students have helped freeze some of these moments, so they can’t go by without us noticing.

We know that no group of photographs can document fully the complexity and drama of growing up in our schools. But we thought if anyone could give us a window into them, it would be a group of students. It is, after all, their world.