For the 22nd consecutive year, Ada Sunrise Rotary delivered a personal dictionary to every third grader at 17 area schools this October: 906 books in all, funded by proceeds from the club’s Fireball Classic race.
ADA, Okla. — Third graders at 17 schools across Pontotoc County and the surrounding area finished October with a new book of their own. Over the course of the month, members of Ada Sunrise Rotary delivered 906 dictionaries as part of the club’s annual Dictionary Project, handing each third grade student a personal dictionary to use in class this year and keep for good.
Schools receiving dictionaries this year include Ada, Allen, Asher, Byng, Coalgate, Cottonwood, Francis, Homer, Konawa, Latta, Roff, Sasakwa, Stonewall, Stratford, Tupelo, Vanoss, and Wanette.
The project is paid for with proceeds from the Fireball Classic, the club’s Fourth of July race at Wintersmith Park. Every runner who registers and every business that sponsors the race helps put books like these into local classrooms.
Ada Sunrise Rotary delivered its first dictionaries to a single school in 2005 and has repeated the project every year since, working with The Dictionary Project, a national nonprofit that supplies student dictionaries to local sponsors with the goal of putting one in the hands of every American third grader. By 2010, with help from a Rotary District 5770 grant, the club had expanded to every school in Pontotoc County, and it has continued to grow from there.
Wherever schools can make the time, Rotarians do more than drop off boxes. Club members walk students through how a dictionary works, then turn to the reference pages in the back, where a gazetteer, the Braille alphabet, Roman numerals, the longest river in the world, and the longest word in the English language tend to get a room of eight-year-olds talking. At Homer Elementary, 87 students raced to be the first to find “elephant.” At Konawa and Sasakwa, the hunt was for apple, coyote, spaghetti, and zebra. Before leaving, Rotarians remind each student that the book is theirs to keep and to write their name on the second page.
When the pandemic put classroom visits on hold, McFarlane developed an interactive PowerPoint lesson that teachers could use to introduce the dictionaries themselves, with questions students could answer by exploring the book’s reference sections. The club still offers that lesson to schools that prefer a drop-off to a presentation.
“There is nothing quite like watching a classroom light up when two dozen kids all find the same word at once,” McFarlane said. “Our teachers do the hard work every day. We are glad the Fireball Classic lets us give them one more tool for it.”
Basic education and literacy is one of Rotary International’s seven areas of focus, and the Dictionary Project is one of the most direct ways Ada Sunrise Rotary puts that priority to work at home. A dictionary is a small gift, but for a third grader it is often the first reference book they own, and one they can carry well beyond this school year.
Ada Sunrise Rotary thanks the principals, teachers, and staff at each school for welcoming the club into their classrooms, and the many Rotarians who volunteered to make this year’s deliveries.
Ada Sunrise Rotary meets Friday mornings at 6:45 a.m. at the Aldridge in downtown Ada. The club’s community programs include Back to School Basics, the Fireball Classic Memorial Race, the Wintersmith Arboretum, and the annual Dictionary Project. To learn more or get involved, visit adasunriserotary.org or find Ada Sunrise Rotary on Facebook.