Monticello Rotary donates dictionaries

     Members of the Monticello Rotary Club provided student dictionaries to third-grade classes at Sacred Heart Catholic School and Carpenter Elementary School on Sept. 27. The “Student’s Dictionary-Gazetteer” contains thousands of words and their meaning, plus added features: weights and measures, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, maps of the world, information about each country, information about each of the 50 states, information about the planets of the solar system, and biographies of the U.S. presidents.

     Teachers and students thanked Rotarians for reaching out and providing students with a very useful resource. “The dictionaries you provide give students access to word meanings, word families, pronunciations, parts of speech and so much more,” a teacher remarked.

     “It also provides an alternative to digital learning, which is important when we consider exposing our students to both print and digital resources and show then how to balance between both.”

     Shoving aside any notion that today’s students rely more on Google searches and other computer search engines to bolster reading and writing skills, Rotary President Creighton Randolph’s reply is simple: “Dictionaries can be invaluable in gaining familiarity with new words, but the real learning is coming to understand the word’s meaning by reading them in context.”

     Rotary International is a non-profit organization with 32 members in Monticello, and is a global network of 1.2 million neighbors, friends, leaders, and problem-solvers that come together to make positive, lasting change in communities at home and abroad.

     For information on joining Rotary, attend a weekly noon meeting at Pizza Ranch in Monticello.