Club Delivers Dictionaries To Over 800 Third Grade Students

Once again this year, the Rotary Club of Lakewood and Rocky River purchased dictionaries for all 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: Mark Bacon, Curt Brosky, John Clapper, Lynn Donaldson, Jon Fancher, George Frank, Dick Garrett, Chuck Gustafson, Jim Harris, Harlan Radford, Jay Rounds, 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.

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

Since 2005, the club has presented dictionaries to over 9,000 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.

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 features 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.

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Volume 11, Issue 24, Posted 3:38 PM, 11.24.2015