Neighbor News
Rotary Club of Stone Mountain: Third-grade dictionaries encourage students to “read to learn”
Community service project distributes 1,300 dictionaries to local elementary school students.
Rotary International’s motto “Rotary Serving Humanity” was given new meaning with the Rotary Club of Stone Mountain’s January project.
Each year since 2007, RCSM has provided free dictionaries to third grade students in its service area. The annual project is part of a larger one initiated by The Dictionary Project (www.dictionaryproject.org). The goal of this program is to assist all students in becoming good writers, active readers, creative thinkers, and resourceful learners by providing them with their own personal dictionary. The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use at school and at home for years to come. Educators see third grade as the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn, which is why sponsors, like RCSM, are encouraged to gift third-graders every year with their own dictionary.
This year, RCSM members are visiting third-graders in ten DeKalb elementary schools, including Smoke Rise Elementary, and distributing over 1,300 dictionaries. The project is jointly funded by the club and Rotary District 6900.
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The 540 page A Student’s Dictionary has the spelling, meaning, and pronunciation of 35,000 words, as well as over 150 pages of supplemental information, such as the Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, biographies of all the U.S. presidents, world maps, information on the fifty states, information on countries of the world, the periodic table, information on the planets of our solar system, and more. Inside the front cover of each dictionary is the student’s name along with a note that the book is a gift from the Rotary Club of Stone Mountain.
The Stone Mountain club meets every Tuesday for noon lunch at Smoke Rise Country Club; visitors and those interested in learning more about Rotary are welcome to attend as a guest of the club. To learn more about the club and its upcoming programs, go to www.stonemountainrotary.org, or follow on Facebook and Twitter.
