By Alexandra Stieber
Special to The Rotarian
29 April 2005
"Dear Rotary Club, Thank you for the handsome dictionary. This is going to make me smarter. My favorite page is 842. It is a picture of presidents. When I looked up the word frog it was easy to find. Merry Christmas, Rodrigo."
Rodrigo, a third-grader at the Cinnabar School in Petaluma, Calif., recently received an English dictionary from the Rotary Club of Petaluma. He is one of thousands of students who have benefited from the club's dictionary project, which helps bring dictionaries to third-graders in public and private schools throughout the country, since it began in 1999.
"So often when we're talking to children where English is a second language that dictionary is the only book in their house," says Harvey Freetly, the Petaluma Rotarian who heads the project. "Our goal is to provide this dictionary to each third-grade student."
The project began when Freetly suggested that Petaluma Rotarians use club funds earmarked for children in the community by joining forces with the Sonoma County Literacy Coalition, the primary literacy organization in the California county. In the first year, the club purchased 400 dictionaries; the Literacy Coalition donated another 600. Freetly recruited clubs in the district that already ran small-scale dictionary projects, and soon clubs statewide were involved. The project then began to spread across the nation. In the past five years, about 60 clubs from California, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio have participated, giving away nearly 55,000 dictionaries.
"The response has been absolutely fantastic . . . unimaginable," says Freetly. "More than one teacher has indicated that the second-graders, when they start in third grade, look forward to three things: the holiday break, the spring break, and the dictionaries."
Tawny Tesconi, a Petaluma Rotarian, has distributed dictionaries for years but only recently joined the project committee. "The work is so rewarding, especially in the classrooms when you see the children getting the dictionaries,"she says. "They're so used to getting old, tattered books, so when they get the new dictionaries it's always a surprise."
The large, hardcover Simon & Schuster dictionaries are child-friendly, with 35,000 entries, photos, illustrations, and a reference section containing information about the solar system, international flags, and U.S. presidents. Many students use their dictionaries past the third grade.
"We actually go into the classrooms, hand out each dictionary, and write the child's name in the cover of it," explains John Dado, a Petaluma Rotarian who will soon take over for Freetly as project head. "The sixth- and seventh-grade students still have those dictionaries and are using them."
Teachers are happy with the dictionaries, too. Cynthia Pick, a third-grade teacher at Cinnabar School, says her students have been applying what they learn from their dictionaries.
"Their overall knowledge of what's in a dictionary and how to use a dictionary has improved," she says. As the project continues to expand, and Cynthia Kent-Mills, a member of the Rotary Club of Southern Pines, N.C., says she considers the dictionaries an important part of efforts to promote literacy in the community.
"It's just a wonderful project," says Kent-Mills. "The teachers love it. The kids love it. It introduces Rotary. Literacy to me is the key to the future."
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