Rotary Delivers Dictionaries To 769 Third Grade Students

Past president Lynn Donaldson tells third grade students at Roosevelt School in Lakewood about Rotary and the dictionaries they are about to receive.

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Once again this year, the Rotary Club of Lakewood and Rocky River purchased dictionaries for all 769 third grade students in Lakewood and Rocky River.

Club members take the dictionaries into the classrooms and deliver them personally to each student. 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: Jon Clark, Marjorie Corrigan, Matt Daugherty, Lynn Donaldson, Jon Fancher, George Frank, Dick Garrett, Chuck Gustafson, Jim Harris, Todd Lessig, Jean Rounds, and Michael Shoaf. Jay Rounds was the project chairperson.

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.
The first page of each dictionary is stamped with the club’s name and a copy of the Four-Way Test of Rotary.

Since 2005, the club has given dictionaries to 8,032 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.

Students and teachers alike are very appreciative of the gift, and each year the club receives hundreds of letters and thank-you cards written by the students. The letters mention the students’ favorite section of the dictionary and how they have begun to use the dictionary in their classrooms.

One student said that she could not wait for her dictionary as her brother received one the year before. Another student wrote, “Thank you for the dictionary. I absolutely love the planet part.” A third student stated, “The thing I like best is it helps me with my writing.”

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.