ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Coco Sunrez and Jessica Jewkes take a guess at Superintendent Catherine Latham’s question on how many third-graders there are in Lynn during the dictionary distribution.
By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
LYNN — More than 1,300 third-graders in the city were given new dictionaries Wednesday morning as part of Lynn Rotary Club’s Dictionary Project.
The students at Sewell-Anderson Elementary School immediately recognized the books’ value.
“I think it’s pretty cool,” said Jessica Jewkes, 8. “I do have problems writing at my house. It’s loud and my mom has to help me with a lot of words.”
Superintendent Dr. Catherine Latham assisted club members in the distribution at Sewell-Anderson, which was just one of 19 of the city’s public schools to benefit from the project.
She offered a brief lesson on how tamo search for a word, its part of speech and meaning. The back of each dictionary includes additional information, including a list of U.S presidents and states, and sign language and braille charts.
“We have many high school students who still have the dictionaries they got in the third grade,” Latham told the students.
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“The children love these,” said Angela Maggs, a third grade teacher at the school. “We will use them as a tool in the classroom. There are a lot of fun things in the back they can learn about. They’ve already shown me there are multiplication tables.”
The Lynn Rotary Club has been participating in the project as part of an international program for more than a decade. Equitable Bank, an entity that formed when Equitable Cooperative Bank and Weymouth Bank merged in 2016, has been the financial sponsor of the project for six years.
President Don Smith said the bank spends about $3,000 each year on the dictionaries.
Rotarians present them to classrooms across the city at 9 a.m., said Rotary Club President Ray Bastarache, who chooses to distribute at Sewell-Anderson because he has a personal connection to the school.
“I was the principal of this school from 1991 to 2001,” Bastarache said. “I’ve been in this room many times.
“We always emphasize to the students that they own the book — we tell them they can bring them home,” he said. “It’s one of the only occasions in the public school (system) they are given their own book. We make the assumption everyone has access to technology at home, but not everybody does. They can’t all just do a Google search when they don’t know a word.”
Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.