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BUCHANAN — After classes were dismissed on Wednesday afternoon at Moccasin Elementary, two members of the Rebecca Dewey Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution brought in boxes stuffed to the brim with classroom supplies.

The organization is a nonprofit, non-political volunteer women’s service organization. The DAR promotes patriotism, American history and educating on American history and civics. The organization is also lineage based, with members tracing their family trees to a patriot from the American Revolution.

The boxes made their way with the Chapter Regent Kat Alton and chapter Chairwoman for the County Classroom Committee Tifanni Dash into Michelle Horvath’s second-grade classroom. Contained in the boxes were supplies like composition books, second-grade level reading books, building bricks, crayons, water colors and pool noodles.

“With COVID-19, I needed some new things that we were able to do where the students aren’t right next to one another. That’s where the pool noodles started,” Horvath said.

Inspired by videos online of other classrooms, she intends to use the pool noodles with students for cardio drumming exercises at their desks.

Those are just one of the many activities the supplies donated to her classroom will be put to use for. With 20 students, Horvath has been working on catching the second graders up on things like fine motor skills that are worked on in the early elementary years — skills that are difficult to teach from a computer.

“The markers, coloring books and Play-Doh are all hand strengthening things,” Horvath said. “Since the students have been away from the classroom for so long, they need to work on that.”

Dash used to be a teacher, and understands how having certain supplies can make the difference in in a classroom. She also knew many teachers buy many supplies themselves.

“My job is to seek out teachers in the local community,” Dash said. “We do different supply drives for anything the classrooms need that we as an organization can provide. We also try to do volunteer hours, but this year, we are not in the classrooms.”

The Daughters of the American Revolution nationwide have also been working on putting together a database of lesson plans online for teachers from kindergarten through 12^th grade to use.

“They are on different DAR topics, anything from U.S. History, civics, Native Americans,” Dash said. “We are just trying to get the lesson plans on the website. They’re completely free. We are working to meet up with the times, and seeing what teachers need.”

The classroom committee is fairly new to the Rebecca Dewey Chapter, according to Alton.

“We haven’t had a community classroom chair before,” Alton said. “We were very excited about it. We have a couple of teachers in our membership.”

Alton said the donation that made funding Horvath’s classroom wish list possible was through a member’s union.

“They had a community funding committee, and decided to give us some money for our schools,” Alton said. “This was a huge blessing, and we were able to distribute it.”