Elizabethtown Rotary Club donates dictionaries to third graders

I am known by my friends and family as a grammar and spelling savant. I am the person they come to when they can’t remember how to spell something, they need their documents edited, or they can’t recall what an adverb is. There’s a reason I became a writer after all, and although everyone has always told me that writing “just comes naturally” to me, I know the truth about why I have such an extensive vocabulary and a knack for spelling.

When I was in elementary school, I attended a small local daycare run out of the home of a woman, Mrs. Taylor, near my house. She was a very nice lady who filled her home with toys and games, and her backyard with playground equipment. I went to her house after school and any weekday we had off.

After a quick snack, the first thing we had to do when we arrived from school was our homework. The caretaker who supervised us while we did our homework was Ms. Linda, a stern but kind woman in her early 70s who also happened to be Mrs. Taylor’s mother-in-law. If I could count on Ms. Linda for one thing when I had trouble with writing or spelling, it was that she was always going to respond to my questions with “look it up.” I heard it constantly which meant that I spent a lot of time leafing through the pages of the worn-out dictionary they kept in the house. The process of having to find what I was looking for on my own fed my curiosity and I found myself absorbing new terms like a sponge. Dictionaries, in my experience, created a snowball effect. In my search for one word, I learned five other new words I had never seen or heard; my vocabulary quickly surpassed my peers, and occasionally, my elders.

Although it frustrated me back then, I realize upon reflection almost two decades later that Ms. Linda ignited my passion for words and encouraged my curiosity. As lame as it might sound, those days spent searching through the dictionary probably altered the course of my life in some unexplainable way.

Hopefully, the third graders who recently received new dictionaries on behalf of the Elizabethtown Rotary Club will experience the same wonder that I found in discovering new words and new ways to describe things and express themselves.

During the months of October and November, the Rotary Club delivered 283 dictionaries to third graders in schools throughout Bladen County.

The number of dictionaries received by each school is as follows:

Bladen Lakes Primary School – 31

Dublin Primary School – 32

East Arcadia School – 12

Elizabethtown Primary School – 83

Emereau Bladen – 68

Plain View Primary School – 40

Elizabethtown Christian Academy – 17

In today’s largely digital world, it could seem counterintuitive to provide students with physical dictionaries when they could utilize Google or autocorrect. It would certainly save time. The benefit of dictionaries, however, is that it enhances problem-solving skills, and teaches alphabetical order and how to locate and recognize words. Students’ brains get a workout from utilizing skills such as sequencing, spelling, and context. It teaches them to be critical thinkers.

Searching through the dictionary teaches students why their spelling is being corrected rather than just providing the correct answer. Dictionaries provide pronunciation and word origin which could help students understand that English words are derived from words in other languages. This would explain why spelling in English can be so confusing and prevent students from getting frustrated at something that can seem pointless.

This fall, the Elizabethtown Rotary Club gave 283 third-graders everything they need to build a solid foundation with language and vocabulary. Because as I learned from Ms. Linda years ago, all it takes to ignite a love of words is one single dictionary and someone to tell you to “look it up.”