Rotarians present thesauruses to area third-graders
PRESQUE ISLE ROTARIANS Gene Lynch II, left, and Brian Hamel help Mapleton Elementary School students Kayla Williams and Brady Miller locate a word in their new thesauruses which were presented by the Rotary Club Oct. 21.
Looking on is student Delaney Alward. The children are third-graders in Jay Blackstone’s class. This was the sixth consecutive year that the Presque Isle Rotary Club has donated thesauruses to third-graders at Zippel, Mapleton and Easton elementary schools.
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
Staff Writer
MAPLETON — Third-graders at Mapleton Elementary School were “thankful” to receive thesauruses from the Presque Isle Rotary Club Oct. 21. Now after learning more about the resource tool, they can also describe their feelings as “grateful,” “appreciative,” “pleased” or “gratified.”
For the sixth consecutive year, members of the Rotary Club donated thesauruses to third-graders at Zippel, Mapleton and Easton elementary schools.
“Six years ago I was president of the Presque Isle Rotary Club, and as all presidents do, I was looking at our goals for the year,” said Rotarian Sharon Campbell. “Rotary International asked us to do literacy projects in our local communities. Literacy throughout the world — including our own neighborhoods — is a foundation of Rotary International.
“I got the idea from an article in the Rotarian magazine where another club had purchased dictionaries for students,” she said. “After doing some research of our own school system, it was decided to provide thesauruses to the children. Our goal was to give them to the children, so they could take them to fourth and fifth grades and get the value of the book and the value of the message … that somebody besides their parents and their teachers thinks that learning and literacy are important.”
More than a dozen Rotarians volunteered to go into the classrooms and deliver the 140 books.
“The membership continues to be excited about this event,” Campbell said. “While the teachers and students enjoy it, the Rotarians really like the interaction with the students, and it’s a tangible gift. The key to a good project is having the excitement of the members, and that’s certainly the case with this project. I always have more than enough volunteers who are willing to go into the classrooms.
“We — as a club — are really good at raising money and we’re proud of that, but we don’t do a lot of hands-on projects,” she said. “After doing this for the first time in 2006, our members asked, ‘Are we going to do this again?’ They were very excited about it and they could see that the kids were excited and that we were making a difference. Sometimes writing a check does not give you that same feeling, so based on the enthusiasm of our members, we’ve continued the project. It’s about a $1,200 investment, but it’s well worth it.”
The money to purchase the thesauruses comes from a Rotary Youth Fund that is maintained every year thanks to the organization’s annual auction.
Mapleton third-grade teacher Judy Atcheson said the thesauruses are valuable tools for a number of reasons.
“One of the reasons I like my students to have a thesaurus is when they do writing pieces in third grade, we have a scoring sheet called a rubric, and one of the things that we score is ‘word choice,’” she said. “Having a book of synonyms helps the students to learn to make a better word choice. For example, instead of saying ‘big’ if they look it up in a thesaurus, they may choose ‘gigantic.’ If they’re using the word ‘gigantic’ in their final copy, they’ll have a higher score for word choice.
“Also in our reading program, the kids take a benchmark booklet every so many stories that checks their progress. One of the things on that can be the use of synonyms and antonyms as a word skill, so it’s helping them in their benchmarks of what they should be mastering in third grade,” said Atcheson. “We also talk a lot about making their writing interesting to other people, and how as a writer there are things they can do to hold the interest of their audience and word choice goes along with that. We’re thrilled the Rotary Club does it and I hope that it’s something they’ll be able to continue. It is great for the kids.”
Student Amanda Winslow said she was happy to receive her own thesaurus.
“It’s neat to have my own because you can look up words and it’s your own so you don’t have to borrow it from anybody,” she said. “With a thesaurus, you can find synonyms, or words that mean the same as another word, so if we’re writing in class, I can choose different words. I’m probably going to use mine a lot.
“It’s nice that the Rotarians help other organizations and give them money, and help students by giving us these books,” she said.
Campbell said the Thesaurus Project has generated a lot of interest among area students.
“We’ve got a lot of kids talking about it … they have been waiting to be in third grade as their siblings have gotten a thesaurus along the way,” she said. “It also gets kids talking about Rotary which is great. It helps the kids understand about community service … it’s not just about parents and teachers wanting them to learn, it’s about the entire community being supportive of schools.”
To date, Rotarians have given out nearly 900 thesauruses to area third-graders.
