Rotary Club of Hendersonville members made their rounds to elementary schools recently, distributing more than 1,000 books to third graders in Henderson County.
One of their first stops was Mills River Elementary, where local club president Julie Huneycutt quizzed students on the uses of dictionaries.
“We need dictionaries to help us find words and spell words … and how to pronounce (them),” said Melea Humiston in Erin Stachura’s class.
Other students answered that they would use their new dictionaries to figure out the correct meanings of new words.
Huneycutt directed the students to page 373 in their dictionaries to find the longest word in the dictionary, and to page 537 for American Sign Language alphabet diagrams. And on page 3, students wrote their names in crayon and pencil, claiming the books as their own.
“These are pretty awesome,” Stachura told her class. “You will use these a lot this year.”
It’s the 14th year the Rotary Club of Hendersonville has donated dictionaries to county schools, and Rotarians Bill Crisp and Dan Deely explained that they’re funded through the Sky Polega Gift of Knowledge Grant.
“I think when we put the labels in, there were 1,024 books,” Deely said.
Mills River Principal Chad Auten thanked the Rotarians for their generosity and said each year the 3rd grade students get excited about their new books.
“The kids very much look forward to getting their dictionaries from the Rotary Club,” Auten said.
(Written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)