We have been doing this project for a number of years. This project puts a personal dictionary in the hands of every third grader in our county, both public and home schooled students. This is a dictionary that is the student's property. We put a nice sticker inside the front cover of the book with the student's name on it. It can be taken home, or used at school. We have had positive feedback from the teachers of these children. Some of the teachers use them in the classroom also. We see this as a way to aid our schools in that they may not have to spend budget dollars on dictionaries for the students. It also puts a very nice textbook quality book into the hands of students. We believe this in important at this time as many dictionary exercises can be done on the computer. We believe that in some homes this may be one of the few books a child will actually have that is theirs, perhaps even the only one. It also is a project that gets our Rotary club involved in the schools. We commonly will have two to four Rotarians distribute the dictionaries to the students in the classroom. We use this as an opportunity to get some exposure for the project and our club in our local newspaper.
We typically order the dictionaries in the late summer after getting a count of the students, and take them to the schools in November. We have one of our members lead the project and have volunteers help pass them out.
The costs for the project are for the dictionaries themselves, which last year was $1,012.00.
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