Rotary Delivers Dictionaries To 776 Third Grade Students

Again this year, the Rotary Club of Lakewood and Rocky River purchased dictionaries for all 776 third grade students in Lakewood and Rocky River.

Club members take the dictionaries into the classrooms and deliver them personally to the students. They then spend time talking to the students about how Rotary is active in their communities and internationally.

Members distributing the dictionaries to the students were: Phil Alexander, Marjorie Corrigan, Matt Daugherty, Jon Fancher, Pam Gallagher, Dick Garrett, Chuck Gustafson, Jim Harris, Todd Lessig, Jay Rounds, Jean Rounds, and Michael Shoaf.

Schools receiving dictionaries were: Rocky River – Kensington Intermediate, Ruffing Montessori, and St. Christopher; Lakewood – Emerson, Grant, Harrison, Hayes, Horace Mann, Lakewood Catholic Academy, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Each dictionary has a label affixed on the inside front cover with the club’s name and the Four-Way Test of Rotary.

Since 2005, the club has given dictionaries to 6,528 students. The dictionaries are published by The Dictionary Project. A nonprofit organization, its goal is to assist all students to become good writers, active readers and creative thinkers by providing them with a gift of their own personal dictionary.

Each year, the club receives hundreds of thank-you letters from the students. The letters mention the students’ favorite section of the dictionary and how they have begun to use the dictionary in their classrooms.

The dictionary features over 32,000 words with simple, child-friendly definitions, plus pronunciation and parts of speech, and includes additional information about punctuation, the nine parts of speech, weights and measures, Roman numerals, and a map of the United States.

Over 150 pages of supplemental information in the back feature the Constitution of the U.S., the Declaration of Independence, brief biographies of all U. S. presidents, world maps, information about all 50 states, countries of the world, and the planets in our solar system. It ends with the longest word in the English language.