To the kindergarten classes at Park City Elementary, Wes Arms is the next best thing to a magician.
He sleeps in a tiny box, he can carry 80,000 pounds and with one swift motion of his arm, he can remove a tarp and make several tons of steel appear.
Not to mention the truck driver has a "really cool" air horn that can be heard all the way across the playground.
About once a month, Arms pulls his 18-wheeler over from his cross-country travels and delivers a day full of learning to the students in his daughter's class.
And since his last visit, the classes have received postcards from each of the states he visited with historical facts and geography lessons.
As part of Trucker Buddy International, Arms has become a pen pal with the students and joins several thousand other truckers across the country in promoting writing and mapping skills as classes keep track of his travels by pinning his postcards to the United States map.
Arms said he got involved after seeing an article about the program in a trucker magazine and bringing it to his daughter 5-year-old Skylyn Arms' teacher.
While the little faces light up at the enormous rig, Arms said it is just as enlightening for him.
"The last time I came ... they were at recess and I blew the air horn and they all came running," he said. "It made me feel 10 feet tall."
The glow of a windmill video, taken by Arms on his last trip to Oklahoma, shone on students' faces as Shelia Mizell whispered the impact the program has had on her kindergarten class.
"They love it, they get so excited," she said. "With funding being so limited for field trips because of gas, the more things we can get to come here really helps us to reach children with different ways of learning."
Nearly 70 students at the school have climbed through Arms' trailer and discovered his bed and living quarters where he sleeps on long-distance road hauls.
"I was surprised, it's like a house in there," Sydney Newberry, 6, said. "It's not just seats, there's a bed and a blanket, too."
Stella Downs said the students love pin-pointing on the map where their trucker buddy has been each week.
"It's a good experience for children to see the real-world experiences he's having," she said. "It's really something they understand. I could pull out a map and start telling them about it and they may not understand, but if you say 'this is where our trucker buddy is,' they get really interested."
Mizell said her students are learning about land forms, modes of transportation, map skills and writing forms. Arms has brought coloring books from the Kentucky Department of Transportation and rulers from his employer, Boyd Brothers.
The driver tells stories about seeing cacti and sagebrush in Arizona and his recent trip to an Indian reservation in Oklahoma.
"I got to see some big Indian chiefs -- they don't wear them head feathers any more, though," he said.
Arms said he wanted to get involved because his "daughter is (his) world," and he's glad to see "there's still an appreciation for truck driving out there."
According to Trucker Buddy International, the program has reached more than a million schoolchildren since it started in the early 1990s.
"I just wanted to do what I can to give back," he said.
