WELLS ─ Nearing the end of school this past June, seventh-graders and kindergarten students in the Wells-Ogunquit Community School District joined together on the playground of Wells Elementary School to meet, talk and play with wooden toy race cars made by the older students in their science class.

This annual meeting is the last stage of what teachers involved with this project refer to as “buddy learning.”

About 10 years ago, Wells Junior High School Science teacher Saul Lindauer decided to try involving kindergarten students from WES with his seventh-grade science class’s year-end physics project.

He found inspiration to put this idea into practice not far from home.

“Breakwater School, where my wife taught and my own children went to school has always had learning buddies,” said Lindauer.  “This multiage mentor/student activity is very powerful.”

So, beginning with that first year,  Lindauer and Wells Elementary School kindergarten teacher Marcia Millian have worked together to coordinate a buddy learning program involving their differing age groups of students.

“The seventh-grade and kindergarten buddy project is one of the best things to happen all year,” Millian said. “It is amazing to watch new friendships form, the seventh-graders coming back to WES and reliving their kindergarten year, and the current kindergartners hoping for a life-long friend.”

In the spring, seventh-graders, including the science students of Christine Durocher, are each matched up with a kindergarten student.  For the past five years, the project finds the older students constructing the cars to help them understand the physics principles of “force and motion.”

This year, 104 cars were assembled mostly with recyclable materials from Ruth’s Reusable Resources in Portland.  The car chassis are standardized and accessorizing is decided by each student. The study of language arts was included as the older and younger “buddies” exchanged back-and-forth letters of introduction before meeting on the playground.

As a follow up, kindergarteners sent illustrated “thank you” cards to the older students after the visit.

According to Lindauer, seventh-graders were thrilled with the correspondence.

Lindauer summed up his students’ experience in a simple way.

“Grade 7 students step out of their preteen, self-absorbed worlds and genuinely engage with these young learners, instantly becoming important role models without having been told to do so,” he said.

The two-week car construction involves six classes and is broken down into the building and testing stages, Lindauer said.

Millian and WJHS teacher Mary Rand coordinated the inclusion of language arts in this year’s project and say that the subject of reading will be added to the mix next year.