Sugar House Rotary donates dictionaries to Nibley Park School

An excited flutter of crisp new pages filled a small commons room in Nibley Park School recently.

Members of the Sugar House Rotary Club brought 62 brand new dictionaries -- one for each child in Nibley’s third grade -- to the school on Oct. 18. Each book had a personalized sticker inside that included the child’s name.

“What good is a dictionary?” Sugar House Club Vice President Harold Weight asked the students, as their teachers helped pass the books around.

“To learn about a lot of things,” was one student’s answer.

That’s just what they’ve been doing ever since. The students use their dictionaries every day to look up definitions of words while reading, and to make sure they are spelling other words correctly, third-grade teacher Lisa Owen said three weeks after the Rotary members visited.

“They’re much more into the idea of literacy now that they’ve had someone come talk to them about it,” she said.

Rotary places a high importance on spreading literacy. The donation to Nibley Park was only one small part of the Dictionary Project, which is supported by many nonprofit organizations nationwide and in 18 other countries. The project began in Savannah, Georgia in 1992, when one woman donated 50 dictionaries to a local school. Since then over 16,677,000 youth have new dictionaries, including over 2,461,000 in 2010 alone.

“We try to [give a dictionary to] every third grader in the state,” Weight said.

The gift is greatly appreciated at Nibley because it means one less necessity the school has to pay for, and more funds available to help enrich students’ education, Principal Adam Eskelson said.

The dictionaries are especially important tools for the third graders.

“In third grade, kids start moving past the basics of phonics into reading and comprehension,” Eskelson said.

Rotary also donated a clarinet to the school, and gave each of the third-grade teachers a copy of “Apple Dumpling Adventure,” a book that explains Rotary’s values in ways children can understand. The book particularly emphasizes the Four-Way Test - that before saying or doing anything a person should stop and make sure that word or action is true, fair, constructive and beneficial to all involved.