Members of the Seward Rotary presented free student dictionaries to the third and fourth grade classes. Donating them at Seward Elementary’s third grade class taught by Sherri Menze are Seward Rotarians Ken Schmieding and Clark Kolterman.
The Seward Rotary Club’s annual literacy project involves distributing school student dictionaries to three area schools, giving a new student dictionary personally to each student in third grade.
This year, they also included area fourth graders, as the project was delayed last year-so both third and fourth graders received the dictionaries. The Rotary Club presented dictionaries to Seward Elementary, St. Vincent de Paul Elementary and Our Redeemer Lutheran School in Staplehurst. St. John Lutheran School in Seward received their third grade dictionaries from the Esther and Trumann Prange Memorial Fund.
The Rotary Club’s Dictionary Project was funded through a gift to honor of the founder and chair of the Seward Plum Creek Children’s Literacy Festival, Dr. Janell Uffelman, and the longtime coordinator of the festival, Vikki Gremel. Both ladies worked hundreds of volunteer hours over decades to create an outstanding children’s literacy program for Seward and the Midwest. The Rotary Club felt that this project exemplified another dimension of the literacy that these two literacy leaders hoped to achieve and they wanted to honor and thank them in a very tangible way. The work of these volunteers demonstrated the Rotary motto of “Service Above Self!”
The dictionaries are given as a literacy effort by the Seward Rotary Club through the The Dictionary Project of Charleston, South Carolina, through a program to promote the distribution of dictionaries which began locally 1992 in Savannah, Georgia. Since 1995, service organizations, such as Rotary International, have distributed more than ten million dictionaries to students worldwide. Besides offering word definitions, the book also informs on other facts, such as a guide for punctuation, weights and measures, Roman Numerals, maps, cursive lettering and fun facts about interesting words. For more information on the project, visit the web for The Dictionary Project, www.thedictionaryproject.org.
The dictionary presented to the students was a paperback edition of “The Best Dictionary for Students” printed by The Dictionary Project for economical distribution by service organizations and clubs.
The Milford Kiwanis Club donates dictionaries to their local third grade classes. Local Rotarians distributed and discussed the advantages of the free books to each student in their classrooms.
