Pictured is Gil Ullom, chairman of the dictionary project, with third graders from Cardington-Lincoln Elementary School. The students are (left to right) Hadlee Fetter, Eloise Shumaker, Hayley Naylor and Preston Christian.
Courtesy | Dawn Ruehrmund
Since 1995, the Cardington Rotary Club has participated in the Third Grade Dictionary Project and donated hundreds of dictionaries to students at four Morrow County schools: Cardington-Lincoln, Gilead Christian, Highland and Mount Gilead.
This year, a total of 312 dictionaries were given out with 76 going to Cardington-Lincoln, 21 to Gilead Christian, 140 to Highland, and 75 to Mount Gilead. The Cardington Rotary Club has cumulatively sponsored almost 3,200 dictionaries for county students since the beginning of this project at Rotary International.
Gil Ullom, a member of the Rotary Club, is the lead on this endeavor and visited each of the school buildings to explain the importance of the dictionaries in the students’ school work and distribute the books to every third grader.
Offering their comments were third graders from Cardington-Lincoln Elementary School.
Leo Visconti stated, “I really like the dictionary. It has the longest word in the world in it.”
Kayden Globe said, “There is a section for sign language. That is really cool!”
Matteson Krouse will use the dictionary “to look up words I do not know how to spell.”
The Cardington-Lincoln third grade teachers are Katie Kinzel, Liberty Mattix, Dawn Ruehrmund and Sydney Tucker.
The mission statement for the project from the National Rotary Club states, “The goal of this 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 we encourage our sponsors to give dictionaries each year to children in the third grade.”
Quinn Maceyko is a correspondent for the Morrow County Sentinel.
