Rotary Club Dictionary Program Chair Paul Crowley hands out free dictionaries in Jared Nagreen’s fourth and fifth grade Horizon classroom Tuesday morning. Crowley then led them through exercises to teach them how to navigate their new books.
Rotary Club Dictionary Program Chair Paul Crowley hands out free dictionaries in Jared Nagreen’s fourth and fifth grade Horizon classroom Tuesday morning. Crowley then led them through exercises to teach them how to navigate their new books.
Trisha Walker
Jocelyn Ramirez, left, and Dakota Maichel help each other look up the word “polio" ...
Trisha Walker
... while Julia Bounds, foreground, Evita Lynn, Jennifer Estey and Anthony Lavino do the same.
A tradition that has spanned the past 20 years continued at Horizon Christian School on Tuesday morning.
Paul Crowley, chair of Hood River Rotary Club’s dictionary program, handed out dictionaries to fourth and fifth graders in Jared Nagreen’s classroom, as representatives have in all the county’s schools this year. The club distributes free dictionaries to fifth graders, with the exception of Cascade Locks and Horizon schools, who have blended classrooms. In those schools, fourth graders receive the dictionaries, as do any new fifth graders, so everyone has the same learning tools.
The program was started by Rotary member Dick Lamm, now deceased, who had learned of a similar program run by the West Salem Rotary. It’s now a “pretty regular component” of all Rotary clubs, Crowley said. In Hood River County, each school has representatives who handle the passing out of the new dictionaries.
During his presentation, Crowley talked about Rotary and its mission to end polio — and how only two countries worldwide have not eradicated the disease — and then helped students navigate their new books by showing them how to look up words.
The program has been going on so long that many former students remember receiving their own dictionaries. When Nagreen told his wife, Alyssa Jensen, a 2009 Horizon grad, about Crowley’s visit that morning, “She said, ‘I remember when he came when I was in fifth grade!’” Nagreen said.
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