CRYSTAL RIVER - Crystal River
Rotarian President Cliff Pierson got the idea on his way to Sweden
to attend an international Rotarian convention.
On the flight, he sat next to a fellow
Rotarian from California whose club was the first to distribute
dictionaries to children as a project.
Pierson agreed it was a good idea and set
about doing the same thing in Citrus County.
He organized his club and the Inverness,
Homosassa, Central Citrus and King's Bay Rotarians to purchase and
distribute about 1,250 of the reference books to public and private
school third-graders.
Crystal River Primary School third-graders
recently gathered in their media center to find several Crystal
River Rotarians waiting for them with lots of boxes.
Pierson called them forward to receive
their own copies of the books.
As they returned to their seats and opened
their new dictionaries, they found labels reminding them who gave
them the books and providing a place to write their names. Then they
started looking through them.
"There's maps and stuff."
"Did you look in the back? Weights and
measures."
After the books were handed out, Pierson
challenged the children to look up three words.
The first was "community," to illustrate
that the Rotarians and the children are of the same community.
The second was "hero."
"You're my heroes, 'cause you're going to
school and trying to learn," he said. The third word was "mumble,"
just for fun.
"Do you have any idea what mumble means,"
Pierson asked.
"Look it up," the name of the program, rang
out in a chorus of voices.
A large part of the Rotarian mission,
Pierson said, is literacy. At about $2 a dictionary, he said, the
whole county can be covered for about $3,000.
The students were already making plans for
their new books.
Billy Bryant, 9, was looking through his
and said: "I'm going to put it in a safe place, so if I need help
with it, I can just look it up."
Shiloh Hunter, 8, said, "I'm going to
practice my words by looking up words and learning what they mean."
Gabrielle Moore, 8, said it was very cool
for the Rotarians to do this for them.
She said she plans to "look up words that I
don't know how to sound out and look up all kinds of stuff that I
haven't learned about and I would like to keep this for a very long
time."
