Rotary gives third graders new dictionaries

They're all new words which were recently added to Webster's Dictionary.

And now, third graders at Cedar Park Elementary will be able to look up those words and thousands of others thanks to Trumann Rotary Club.

Rotary donated 125 new dictionaries to the school this week as part of the club's annual literacy project.

Over 1.3 million children in America have received a dictionary thanks to local Rotary Clubs.

"We are proud that we can do this and we want you to use this to discover new words and use it in your writing and literacy classes," Wee Cat administrator Regina Stacy told the students.

Stacy explained that the very first dictionary was published in 1828 by a man named Noah Webster and that every year new words are added to it to keep it up to date.

"Years have passed and Noah Webster is still the number one name in dictionaries," Stacy said.

Stacy said there is even a website -- www.websters-online-dictionary.org -- where students can go to learn new words.

The site features a new word of the day for students to look up its meaning.

Today's word was 'enclave' which means a small territory.

"If you do that, how many new words in a year would you learn if you do that?" Stacy asked. "A whole bunch."

The goal of the dictionary program is to help students become better writers, active readers and creative thinkers.

The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use in school. Students are allowed to take it home after the school year to use as their own personal reference book throughout their elementary school careers.

Educators say third grade is a key year in a child's education and the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn.

"What a blessing," said third and fourth grade literacy coach Dana Spencer. "There are so many ways we use them. The whole curriculum we are always building their vocabulary. They may pull a word from vocabulary that adds meaning to the reading or talk about it within the context of a story they are reading or use it when they are analyzing words within their skill blocks to talk about words that are unfamiliar so they can learn their meaning."

Spencer said the school regularly has a word of the day to help the children build vocabulary.

By the end of the school year students will have learned over 200 new words.

It is estimated that the average adult's vocabulary stops growing by age 25 and that the average person knows fewer than 100,000 words.

"The kids will use them as a resource in the classroom during the writing process and when they are revising and editing their work," Spencer said.

"If they get stuck we encourage them to look the word up. It also helps to sharpen their alphabetizing and using guide words and they do dictionary drills with them and talk about the kind of information they can retrieve from this reference text."