Dictionary project spells excitement for students

Rotary clubs provide books to help with words

Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff Photo by Gretchen Phillips Third-grader Bruce Long, front, and classmate Tommy Peck shuffle through their new dictionaries to find the longest word in the English language. The Rotary clubs of Prince Frederick and Northern Calvert handed out new dictionaries to third-graders at Calvert Elementary School on Tuesday, Oct. 10. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

Last week, the Rotary Club of Prince Frederick and the Rotary Club of Northern Calvert County presented dictionaries to all third-graders enrolled in Calvert County public schools and the third-graders at Our Lady Star of the Sea School in Solomons as one of the many community outreach projects the clubs put together each year.

The dictionary project is in its third year with the Rotary Club. The dictionaries chosen were titled ‘‘A Student Dictionary,” by Project Inc.

‘‘We are very pleased to be able to do this,” said Warren Prince, president of the Rotary Club of Prince Frederick.

Prince, along with Rotary member Eugene Karol, who is running for the Calvert County Board of Education, were at Calvert Elementary School on Tuesday, Oct. 10, where four third-grade classes eagerly awaited their new dictionaries.

‘‘Students at the third-grade level understand and can use dictionaries,” Karol said. Karol said the Rotary Club wants each third-grader to have his or her own dictionary to carry with him or her throughout his or her schooling.

The student dictionaries given out had more than just words and definitions.

Each book contains biographies of each U.S. president, geographical information and much more.

The students were excited to receive the dictionaries.

Julia Call, one of the third-grade teachers at Calvert Elementary, said the students were looking forward to this presentation mostly so they could find out what the longest word was.

In this dictionary, the longest word — a chemical formula — contains more than a thousand letters. The students’ eyes lit up as they looked at the word and then tried to pronounce it.

Many students looked up some of their personal favorites.

‘‘My favorite word is my first word after ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’: French fry,” Arianna Hunter, 9, said.

She said she also liked the word imitate, which she said means to ‘‘act like someone else.”

Nicholas Abel chose a smaller word as his favorite.

‘‘My favorite word is dog, because I like dogs,” he said.

While the Rotary Club gave each child his or her own book, with a label for his or her name, teachers are asking that students keep the dictionary in their desks so they can always have them to refer to in class.

E-mail Gretchen Phillips at gphillips@somdnews.com.