Community

Seattle Education Access thanks
University Sunrise Rotary for equipment.

ROTARY CLUB of UNIVERSITY SUNRISE DISTRIBUTES DICTIONARIES TO THIRD GRADERS

The third graders of Greenwood Elementary were the proud recipients of their very own “American Heritage Children’s Dictionary”, a hardback book of 928 pages with over 25,000 entries and over 1500 color pictures and illustrations. The kids quickly found a map of the United States!

Introduced to the 36 third graders, 25 students from Mrs. Raichle’s class and 11 from Mrs. Schmidt’s class, by Roberta MacKinnon, in her ninth year as a volunteer at Greenwood Elementary, were Paul Weibel, past president of Rotary Club of University Sunrise, and Teri St. Onge, current Community Service chairperson.

Teri St. Onge told the third graders that they were very happy and excited to be in their class and to tell them a little bit about what Rotary does. She explained that Rotary is an international service organization of business and professional persons who help make the world a better place by promoting goodwill and peace in the world. Teri explained that our club helps in our community by putting on food and clothing drives, participating in student exchange programs to foreign countries, working with the homeless, and partnering with an organization that helps students get into and stay in college, among other things.

St. Onge told the kids that Rotary believes that reading is THE most important skill of all, and that with this skill, each student has the opportunity to be a good writer with a great vocabulary, an active reader, a creative thinker and a big success in life!

Paul, Teri and Roberta than presented to each student their very own dictionary.

Roberta had the students look up a word – ‘centennial’, which is very appropriate to the school, which is celebrating their own centennial. The word was quickly found and the definition read by a student. Another word was selected – ‘holiday’ and the students enthusiastically looked up the word, again reading the definition out loud for all to hear! Mrs. Raichle and all of the students thanked us for the dictionaries, expressing their pleasure that they were able to keep the dictionaries as their own. To date, Rotary clubs have distributed over 12,000,000 dictionaries. This is the first year that the Rotary Club of University Sunrise has participated in the nationwide program, known as the Dictionary Project. We are hoping to continue our participation in this project, which was funded by a University Sunrise Service Foundation grant.