Students, staff and members of the San Juan County Rotary Club met Thursday morning in the McCormick Elementary cafeteria to recognize attendance and reading progress.
Grades were divided into three assemblies starting with kindergarten and first grade.
Principal Lyn White began the assemblies by awarding students with near-perfect attendance with a certificate and a medal.
Jesus Villalobos of the San Juan County Rotary Club presented a bicycle to winners of the windmill contest. It was the first year the Rotary Club included the contest, along with the reading progress challenge, Villalobos said.
Students read the story “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” and constructed a windmill that was then critiqued by teachers using a rubric.
“I saw this as an opportunity for the kids to be more involved in STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics,” Villalobos said.
For a moment, the McCormick cafeteria was silent as students awaited in anticipation as names were chosen from the drawing Then came an eruption in cheer when a classmate was named.
Every year, the Rotary Club donates more than 420 books to McCormick Elementary, according to Rotary Club President Terri Fortner.
The nonprofit has run the program at McCormick for more than 10 years, members of the organization said, and hopes to expand the program to other schools.
Funding for the books comes from the Healing Field event hosted by the Rotary Club, Fortner said.
“Really the goal was to get them interested in reading outside of this,” Rotary member Gary Risley said. “They can see how the applications of what they read in a book can be applied to other things in life.”
The program is a schoolwide effort that involves every student, teacher and faculty member being involved, said reading intervention teacher Lisa Korbas.
At the core of it, children are being rewarded for their effort to read more, she said.
“Maybe if the progress is even little or it’s stagnant, we still have to include those so it’s pretty much mostly everybody,” Korbas said.
Villalobos said the reading program also allows for students to disconnect from technology and get their hands on a physical book.
“Kids nowadays mostly read off tablets, laptops, cellphones,” he said “There’s nothing like actually holding a book in your hand, I remember when I was in elementary school, the smell of those old books, I actually enjoyed it and it’s something that I feel like kids nowadays aren’t experiencing as much.”
Students at McCormick are also getting a new opportunity to hold and own new books outside the Rotary Club reading program.
Located next to the front office sits a bright blue vending machine with colorful imagery. It’s hard to miss and holds something even more unique books.
Taken to the elementary last week, the book vending machine was made possible by a grant from the New Mexico Public Education Department, White said.
Second grader Jacob Knipp provided Tri-City Record with a demonstration of the vending machine by purchasing a book with a token he had received.
Knipp chose the book “Fly Guy’s Amazing Tricks” and said it was his third book he has purchased from the machine.
Some benefits of the machine, according to the Inchy’s Bookworm Vending Machine website, are enthusiasm around reading, good behavior and increasing reading engagement over summer by growing student home libraries.
“Literacy is at the forefront of everything we do,” White said. “We also appreciate our community partners, the Rotary Club has been amazing to support us and we try to take really good care of that relationship because they’re very important to us.”
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