LYNN — The Rotary Club of Lynn gave local third-graders a word or two to think about Wednesday. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say somewhere around 40,000 words.
Wednesday was dictionary day for the Lynn Public Schools, when the Rotary Club — now in the 14th year of its Dictionary Project — distributed more than 1,200 books to third-grade students in all of the city’s public schools.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Patrick Tutwiler was on hand at Callahan Elementary School, along with Principal James Kennison, for the distribution of dictionaries.
Also present were Dr. Ray Bastarache, president of the Lynn Rotary Club, and Tess Cunha, vice president and branch administrator for Reading Cooperative Bank (RCB), which is the newest sponsor of the event. RCB provided funds to cover the cost of the dictionaries.
The Rotary Club of Lynn’s involvement in the Dictionary Project began while James Harris was president in 2008.
“Teaching young children to read has become a major part of Rotary International’s literacy goals in several countries including the United States,” Harris said Wednesday.
“When I was president 16 years ago, I proposed that our club get involved in the Dictionary Project. Other clubs in the district were already participating.”
Harris got a grant from Rotary International to provide funds for the first year of the distribution. Since then, he’s counted on sponsors, the latest being RCB, which took over previous sponsor Coastal Heritage last year.
“This kind of fits in with RCB’s charitable mission in other schools, and other cities. When they found out about this, they realized it tied into their literacy charities,” Harris said.
Since 2008, the Rotary Club of Lynn has presented more than 1,200 dictionaries annually to the third-graders. To date, more than 18,000 have been given out.
Part of an international program by many of the 32,230 Rotary Clubs worldwide, teaching young children to read has become a major part of Rotary International’s literacy goals in several countries including the United States.
The dictionaries were given to each student as a gift. The book offers more than definitions. It also contains some history as in short biographies of the U.S. presidents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; geography as in maps and demographics of U.S. states and world continents and science as in the periodic table of elements, weights and measures, information about the planets in the universe and the student’s favorites, sign language and the longest word in the English language which has 1,909 letters, which is the formula for a protein.
Lynn rotarians and RCB employees participated in the distribution of the dictionaries at the Aborn, Brickett, Callahan, Cobbet, Connery, Drewicz, Fallon, Ford, Harrington, Hood, Ingalls, Lincoln-Thomson, Lynn Woods, Sewell-Anderson, Sisson, Shoemaker, Tracy and Washington S.T.E.M. elementary schools.