Kiwanis Club of Charlotte provides dictionaries to Charlotte-Mecklenburg FOCUS schools

The Kiwanis Club of Charlotte has donated dictionaries to the 3rd graders in the FOCUS schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools for the past 4 years and plan to continue this project for the 2010-2011 school year. This past fall we delivered 4,750 dictionaries to 3rd graders in 46 elementary schools. Our members really enjoyed delivering the dictionaries to classrooms. The students and teachers were most appreciative of our generous gift.

Some of my favorite comments that I heard frequently from some of the students were: Is this really mine? No one has ever given me a book before. May I take it home?

We ask that the students use these at school during the school year and then take home to keep at the end of the year. So many of our schools do no have classroom dictionaries–maybe a couple that they pass around to the entire class.

Thanks again for this great idea of giving dictionaries to students.

Libby Gray

Dictionary Project chair

Kiwanis Club of Charlotte

The Kiwanis Club received many lovely thank-you letters. Here are a few:

‘Dear Kiwanis Club of Charlotte,

Thank you so much for the dictionaries you gave to my third grade students. To say they are thrilled is an understatement! I can’t keep them out of them–which is a good problem to have. They keep challenging each other to find words–or to read an interesting fact from the back of the book. They absolutely love them and can’t believe it is theirs to keep! 🙂

I hope you are able to continue this project for many years to come!

Sincerely,

Ms. Nicole Sparrow

Third Grade Teacher

Statesville Road Elementary’

‘Thank you Kiwana Club for the dictionary. I think if I study the whole dictionary I might get pass the whole third grade. Thank you so so so so much for the dictionary. I love the dictionary a lot!!!

Your friend, Zaria’

‘Dear Kiwanis Club,

Thank you for this dictionary. It is so, so, so cool. Let me tell you what word I looked up hold on…Oh, here is I looked up the word parsnip, a fleshy white root, in the carrot group. In the back I found some words that says ‘Biographies of the U. S. Presidents.’ This gift will help me be a good student because I will know a lot of new words. This was fun. Bye.

Sincerely,

Kaylan

3rd Grader

Statesville Road School’