New Albany Rotary Club donates 384 dictionaries to grade 3 students

The New Albany Rotary Club has partnered with the Dictionary Project to provide dictionaries to every third-grade student at New Albany 2-5 Elementary School. The local Rotarians presented three hundred eighty-four dictionaries to students on Tuesday, May 15.

New Albany Rotary President-elect Marilyn Hughes spearheaded localizing the Dictionary Project, based on her 35-year career as an English teacher at Grover City High School.
“My background made this project very appealing to me, and my fellow Rotarians also embraced it,” said Ms. Hughes. “We hope to continue it in the future. The response from the teachers has been very positive, and it seems we have hit on a beneficial project for our club.”

The goal of the Dictionary Program is to assist all students in becoming good writers, active readers, creative thinkers, and resourceful learners by providing them with their own personal dictionary. The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use at school and at home for years to come. Educators see third grade as the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn, so the Dictionary Project encourages sponsors to give dictionaries each year to children in the third grade. So far, the Dictionary Project has distributed over 17 million dictionaries to third graders in the US and abroad.