The Rotary Club of Lakewood and Rocky River continued its distribution of dictionaries to all third graders in Lakewood and Rocky River this fall, a project that the club began in 2005. A total of 593 dictionaries were distributed to students in 26 different classrooms at 11 different schools.

Harlan Radford, project chair, with assistance from club members, stamped each dictionary with the Rotary logo, the Rotary Four-Way Test, and a place for the student’s name.

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

As always, Rotarians looked forward to volunteering and going to the schools and interacting with both students and teachers. Distributing dictionaries were David Baas, John Chandler, Matt Daugherty, Vicki Foster, Thom Geist, Chuck Gustafson, Jim Harris, George Hwang, Leslie Favre Krogman, and Jay Rounds.

Members were rewarded with smiles on the students’ faces as they receive their dictionaries and begin to explore the contents. Both students and teachers are very appreciative of receiving these dictionaries and using them in the curriculum.

Thank-you letters, written by the students, express their gratitude and enjoyment in owning their very own dictionary. They 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 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.