For the past 30 years, the Geauga West Rotary Club has been providing every third-grade student attending Linsday, Westwood and St. Anselm's Elementary schools with a brand-new dictionary! Jim Zeitz has been leading this very important program for the past 8 years and helps our club fulfill one of the major missions of Rotary International - Literacy.
The goal of the Dictionary Project is to help all students in completing the school year as good writers, active readers and creative thinkers. It is a community effort on the part of the Geauga West Rotary Club designed to improve student literacy by providing third grade students with a gift of their own PERSONAL DICTIONARIES to use in school and at home for years to come.
Educators see the third grade as the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn. A Student Dictionary, however, is more than a dictionary. It includes over 150 pages of supplemental information including the Constitution of the U.S., the Declaration of Independence, brief biographies of all U. S. presidents, maps of the seven continents, and information about all 50 states and more than 175 countries in the world as well information on the planets in the solar system and lots more. Always fascinating to the students is the last page in the book which contains the longest word in the English language containing 1,909 letters; this word is a term for a formula of Tryptophan synthetase A protein.
The parents and teachers of the third graders recognize that “The limits of your language are the limits of your world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein). Teachers indicate that they typically integrate the use of the dictionary/gazetteer into the classroom activities in writing, reading, communication and research assignments. We are proud to announce that once the books are in the students’ possession, we receive thank you notes from the students, their parents, and their teachers. Third graders are also vocal about being pleased to receive a copy of the dictionary as an older sibling already has a copy of the book and they are happy to have their own personal one.
Thank you to our Club members President Ed Slane, Jim Zeitz, Skip Claypool and Lisa Louma who participated in this year’s efforts going into the third-grade classrooms to share information about our Rotary Club and previewing the uses of the dictionary.
