Interact Club students from Cape High work with Cape Elementary
More than 30 students in Cape Coral High’s Interact Club visited Cape Elementary on Wednesday to help the children learn about words that have multiple meanings.
The initiative, known as Dictionary Dynamos, works through a joint operation between the school system and the Rotary Club of Cape Coral.
In October, local Rotary Clubs handed out approximately 10,000 dictionaries to students in the Lee County School District. Now, according to Dr. Steve Maxwell from Cape Coral High, the students will learn multiple definitions using the dictionaries.
“The Rotary Club provided dictionaries to all schools in Cape Coral to become dynamos in the third grade,” said Maxwell. “Now they are getting the application of the dictionary by interacting with students at Cape High.”
The Interact Club is an international community service club for teenagers that is associated with the Rotary. Recently, high school students in the club were asked to make lists of words with various meanings or homographs.
“The lesson they prepared is to have to find those words in the dictionary,” said Assistant Principal Maggie McErlane. “We are just happy they are here.”
Those in the Interact Club sat at round tables with elementary students and read aloud a word that has more than one meaning. In turn the children had to find the word’s other meaning in the dictionary.
A handful of Cape High volunteers, wearing shirts that read “Service Above Self,” worked with the young students in Jan Hunt’s third-grade classroom.
“The kids love to get a word and race to see who gets it fastest,” said Hunt. “We’ve done parts of speech and how to use them correctly. It is a great skill to learn and they are learning it in depth.”
In fact, two of the high school students in the Interact Club had been in Hunt’s class when they attended Cape Elementary. Natalie Acosta and Alison Andrachak were former students and said they recognized certain aspects of Hunt’s classroom.
Scott Kirkwood, a junior at Cape High, said the club had prepared its word lists the day before.
“The day before we submitted the list of words. It was pretty natural and easy,” he said.
Rotary Club is an international organization, but Maxwell explained that Dictionary Dynamos was created in Cape Coral and remains unique to the area.