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Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet Fourth-grader at the Limestone Community School Spencer Soucy places a vote for his favorite rock formation. |
By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
LIMESTONE — While slogans like “voting rocks” and “rock the vote” have attempted to introduce youths into the election process, the adage takes on a new spin at the Limestone Community School where students are enthusiastically voting on rocks.
Ever since speech pathologist Renee Parente introduced a rock-themed Literacy Day last autumn which successfully promoted literacy through multifaceted learning and inspired the students’ creativity by giving each youth their own rock, the lower level students of the Limestone school have been pretty much into rocks.
With the nation’s Republican primaries being covered extensively by seemingly every news agency, exposing students to the election process, Parente decided to use the youngsters’ enthusiasm for rocks to help them learn about the election process.
One activity students particularly enjoyed from Literacy Day was viewing elaborate rock formations from all over the globe using the promethium board; Parente used one of the school’s bulletin boards to post five rock formation photos from the Literacy Day presentation. Each photo has a small description underneath.
As Parente explained, there are five photos of rock formations on the bulletin board currently; students will be given one ballot they can use to vote on their favorite rock formation.
“It’s called the ‘Rock Primaries,’” Parente explained, describing how the activity is helping to introduce students to the concept of voting and decision making.
Of course, an added benefit to using the beloved rock photos to educate students about the election process is they’re learning a bit of geography, geology and, of course, honing their reading and critical thinking skills.
“There are five rock formations up for voting right now and they’ll stay up for two weeks,” Parente explained. Following those two weeks, students will have an opportunity to vote on another set of five rock photos. The winners from the first and second election will be voted on one last time to pick the official favorite rock formation of the Limestone Community School.
While this type of voting literally rocks, Parente expressed the extent that fun promotes learning.
“In the classroom, we’ve talked about all the different things one might vote on, whether it’s which flavor of ice cream a family purchases from the grocery store to who becomes the next president of the United States,” Parente said.
The reasons students like the various rock formations are abundant, and Parente has been quite impressed by the descriptive imagery students have included with their ballots.
One student, for example, described why they like a particular rock formation, saying that it looks like chocolate ice cream with marshmallow running through it.