Armstrong School District is partnering with a local Rotary Club to give all 460 third-grade students a paperback dictionary on Wednesday, October 15, 2008.

Members of the Kittanning Rotary Club raised hundreds of dollars and partnered with the Armstrong School District so that every third-grade student in the Armstrong School District could receive a dictionary. Educators say the dictionary is an essential tool for quality education, and third grade is the ideal age to receive a dictionary because of developing vocabularies. In addition, Rotary Club members have found that many local families do not own a dictionary.

Rotary Club members will visit all Armstrong School District third-grade students during a “Dictionary Giveaway” at 9 a.m. on October 15. Lenape Elementary School third-graders will receive their dictionaries at 11 a.m. The media is welcome to attend to cover this story.

Club members will distribute the dictionaries and explain why they are important. They will lead students in word search exercises and unravel the meanings of words.

“Most importantly, the first thing we will do is ask the students to take out a pen and write their names on the inside cover,” said Autumn Vorpe-Seyler, a past president of the Rotary Club who encouraged her club to take on the project. “This will show them that it is theirs to keep.”

Each 524-page dictionary, called A Student’s Dictionary, contains definitions to 33,000 words, as well as some added features. There are explanations of weights and measures, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, maps of the seven continents, information about the 50 states, biographies of the U.S. presidents, and facts about the planets in the solar system. The dictionaries are being made available by a nonprofit group called The Dictionary Project, which works with local sponsors to provide dictionaries to elementary school students. The Dictionary Project’s goal is to assist all students to become good writers, active readers and creative thinkers through the ownership of a personal dictionary. The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use at school and at home for years to come.

“A student cannot do his or her best work without one,” according to the Dictionary Project’s Web site www.dictionaryproject.org. “A dictionary provides the knowledge to better understand our world and the words to share information.”

The Dictionary Project targets the third grade year because that’s when dictionary skills are taught in most schools, and because that’s when a student makes the transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

“Successful readers use a variety if resources and reference materials to bolster their vocabulary skills and enhance their understanding of written text,” said Dr. Cheryl Soloski, Coordinator of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment for grades K-6 in the Armstrong School District. “The project ensures that all third grade students have access to their own personal copy of a dictionary.”

Pennsylvania is one of the 46 of the 50 states which has academic standards that specifically include dictionary skills in their elementary language arts standards.

Since The Dictionary Project began in 1995, more than 9 million children have received a dictionary, thanks to the generosity of sponsors who have participated.