Brighton Rotary Clubs provide dictionaries for 1,400 third graders

 Northeast Elementary School third-grade teacher Alexis Allan was thrilled about the Brighton Rotary clubs donating dictionaries for all of her students Monday.
`It`s awesome,` she said. `It`s really a great thing. We don`t have enough dictionaries in the classroom, so it`s great the kids can each have one they can use in the classroom and outside of school too.`

In 2010, the Brighton Rotary Club and the Early Brighton Rotary Club will together deliver close to 1,400 dictionaries to third-graders in the 27J School District and the parochial schools in Brighton, said Kevin O`Connell, Brighton Early Rotary Club member and past president. O`Connell also serves as assistant governor for Rotary District 5450.
The Brighton Rotary Clubs have been working together on this project for six years, O`Connell said. They work through the Dictionary Project in South Carolina, who supplies them with the dictionaries at less than $2 per book.
`The involvement by Rotary Clubs supports Rotary`s literacy and education mission nationwide and worldwide,` O`Connell said.
Brighton Early Rotary Club Publicity Chair Linda Young visited Northeast Elementary School Monday to deliver dictionaries to all of the school`s third-grade students.
`I think this is a really important project for our community because it provides these kids with a tool that they can use to help them with their learning and education today and can open up a world of curiosity and exploration for them for the rest of their lives,` Young said.
`I was amazed that so many of them came up to me after they got the books and wanted to show me what they had discovered, including the longest word in the English language, which is on the last page, and they asked me what it meant,` she added. `They asked me if I could help them find `photosynthesis,` because they had just studied it. One girl showed me that she could make an `A` from the sign language page. Two of them were looking up `difficult.` These are paper and ink books, they don`t have batteries or joy sticks or lights or buzzers. How amazing is it to see kids get excited about words in a book, just waiting to be discovered?`