Students turn winning cash into chance to share

The children in Cam Wilson’s first-grade class at Salisbury Academy have learned more than reading. They have learned how to love and share.

When they won a cash award recently for their good deeds from the Rowan Rotary Club and the United Way, they decided to spend the money on someone else.

Once a month, Wilson’s students travel about 100 feet from their classrooms at Haven Lutheran Church to Abundant Living Adult Day Care Center on Harrison Street.

There, they read to the center’s adult clients, a program called Reading Buddies.

The monthly trip has gotten easier and easier as the children get to know the adults, many of them elderly.

Mary Ann Johnson, the director of the Abundant Living Center, nominated them for an award from the Rotary Club.

“I have been very touched by their devotion to our participants and the close bond that they have reached ... The project between the center and the school has just been wonderful for everyone,” Johnson said.

“It’s just a wonderful inter-generational mind between the two groups. ... It started out as a simple project, and it just continues to grow.”

Johnson said that the children won one of the annual Service Above Self awards from the Rotary Club, worth $100, for the class or the school to use.

“When the kids came in for their January visit, the teacher told us that they had decided to give it to us,” Johnson said.

The children called Abundant Living to find out what the center needed.

They bought the center a stethoscope; a sphygmomanometer, which measures blood pressure; and a tympanic thermometer, which measures a person’s temperature through their ear.

Actually, the $100 didn’t buy all three, but a parent of one of the children provided the rest, Johnson said.

“They presented those to the participants and the nurse,”she said. “They even worked it into their academic program.”

Johnson said the center’s clients were thrilled by the children’s gesture. “They’re always happy to see the kids, anyway.”

Johnson said that the school children wanted to see the equipment in action, so the center’s nurse, Marie Zaylor, showed them how each thing was used.

“I took the stethoscope and put it on my heart so they could listen,”Zaylor said.

She explained that the heartbeat “sounds like lub-dub.”

“They all wanted to hear that,”Zaylor said.

“I hope we are able to develop more and more activities between the two groups,”Johnson said.

Contact Joanie Morris at 704-797-4264 or jmorris@salisburypost.com .