My heart was warmed recently when I read about the Rotary Club of Middletown providing third graders with dictionaries.
I was even more surprised to learn that Rotary Clubs and other organizations across the country take part in this Dictionary Project every year, providing third graders with dictionaries. For many students, it is their first book.
The Dictionary Project was founded in 1995 after a Georgia woman first donated dictionaries to schoolchildren in 1992. The woman, Annie Plummer, eventually raised enough money to donate 17,000 dictionaries to schoolchildren and inspired the creation of the project before she died in 1999.
Since 1995, more than 17 million children have received a dictionary through project sponsors, such as Rotary Clubs. According to the project”s website, third grade students are the target of the campaign because educators see third grade as the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn.
This is one of the best campaigns I”ve come across. I know it can be difficult for children to get in the habit of reading both for learning and pleasure. Giving them a dictionary as a gift will endear it to them for hopefully much of their lives.
It reminds me of one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave my brother and me for Christmas.
While my parents always did what they could to get us awesome and thoughtful gifts for Christmas, until we became teens and wanted money so we could buy our own things, this particular gift still stands out whenever I think back to the origins of my desire to learn.
I”m pretty sure I was about 9 and my brother was 7 when my parents gave us a gigantic Random House Children”s Encyclopedia that Christmas.
It didn”t stand out as an awesome gift at the time. I probably thought, “This isn”t a toy,” and moved on to the next gift. But as time went on, the book began to consume me in the best way.
The encyclopedia was huge to me at 9 years old: It was 600 pages long, the size of a large textbook and was really heavy!
I couldn”t help but be intrigued by its illustrations of flora, fauna, life and the many other subjects crammed into its pages. I initially focused on the things I knew, loved and feared. I became completely fascinated.
As time went on, I must have read every page of that book countless times. I read it so much that the original binding wore off and my parents had to use duct tape to keep the book together. Even as I entered my teens and high school, I still would peruse it on occasion.
It”s amazing that nearly 20 years later I can pinpoint that encyclopedia as the beginning of my desire to learn as much as possible about nearly everything. I truly consider that book as the first step on my journalistic path.
I can only hope that those third graders in Middletown and others across the country will be able to look back and view their dictionary gift in a similar way.
I applaud the Dictionary Project and its sponsors for providing third graders with a vital learning tool.
If anyone would like to learn more about the Dictionary Project, visit www.dictionaryproject.org.
Kevin N. Hume can be reached at kevin.n.hume@gmail.com or call directly 263-5636 ext. 14. Twitter @KevinNHume.
