Zach Morse, 8, of Bondville, Vt., won The Reading Rainbow contest with his story Lost in the Desert, the tale of a boy who is separated from his parents while on a camel expedition in Egypt.

8-Year-Old TTC Student Wins Reading Rainbow Young Writers Award

TTC applauds tutoring student Zach Morse, who recently won Third Grade Honorable Mention in the Vermont state competition of the “12th Annual Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest” for a short story he wrote as part of his tutoring at our Manchester Center learning center. The contest is a national competition held by the highly-acclaimed PBS children’s literacy series Reading Rainbow intended to encourage story writing and illustrating in children of grades K through 3. Nationally, over 40,000 students submit stories to the contest.

As a grade-level winner, Zach has had the chance to read his story – “Lost in the Desert” – during a broadcast of the Reading Rainbow TV show. The show will be rebroadcast periodically over coming months. He will also be honored at story-reading events at bookstores in Vermont.

Congratulations to Zach and his exceptional tutor, Leigh Perham, for this outstanding accomplishment!

Zach has been coming to the TTC learning center in Manchester Center for enrichment tutoring for most of the school year. Unlike many area students who come to The Tutorial Center for fundamental academic support in a diversity of school curricula, Zach came to the Center for the pure joy of learning. Feeling that the traditional school classroom experience did not offer enough challenges for Zach’s inquisitive mind, his mother, Melanie Morse, began looking for an enrichment program for her son. Knowing of Zach’s interest in Egyptology (garnered from reading the encyclopedia on his own), Melanie sought a tutor who could augment her son’s school experience by enhancing his knowledge of Ancient Egypt.

At The Tutorial Center, Zach entered into a comprehensive study of Ancient Egypt from the mastaba tombs of the pre-dynastic period to the step pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara in the 3rd Dynasty; from the great pyramids of the Giza Plateau in the 4th Dynasty, to the only monotheistic pharaoh, Akhenaten who built his City of the Sun at Armana; from Tutankhamen, the boy pharaoh who restored polytheism, to Ramses II, the greatest pharaoh-builder of ancient Egypt.

Zach’s learning was both book-based and hands-on. He read parts of French Egyptologist, Christian Jacq’s books on Ramses II. He learned how the great pyramids were a culmination of the mastaba tombs and step pyramids, and why the tombs’ secrets were violated within in a single generation. With frosting as mortar, Zach constructed a pyramid with a secret burial chamber completely from blocks of sugar.

Moving from hands-on to computer-based learning Zach completed a concentrated study of the Giza Plateau using a computer program from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts called “The Giza Archives Project.” He gained an understanding of the Giza necropolis and the monumental sculpture discovered there, and learned the concepts of modern archaeology.

In the course of his study, Zach worked with a tutor who had learned to write the hieroglyph alphabet as part of her study of Egyptology with Peter Manuelian, the Egyptology Curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Zach managed to master the alphabet and to begin to understand how to make words with combinations of symbols for sounds and with pure picture writing. He created a wall fresco in the style of Egyptian tomb painting using hieroglyphs and pictures.

Zach also learned about current archaeological expeditions in Egypt – including the discovery of the tombs of over one hundred of the sons of Ramses II – by the premier American Egyptologist, Kent Weeks. Using Week’s computer program – the Theban Mapping Project – Zach followed the course of the on-going expedition in the Valley of the Kings. Zach wrote to Kent Weeks about his interest in becoming an archaeologist and received a reply encouraging him to continue his studies.

As a culmination to his studies of Ancient Egypt, Zach wrote the story “Lost in the Desert” and entered it in the Reading Rainbow story contest. “Lost in the Desert” tells the story of a boy who is separated from his parents on a camel expedition in Egypt

at The Tutorial Center