The Dictionary Project has been one of Sun Lakes Rotary Club’s most successful and rewarding projects that both students, teachers, and Rotarians look forward to each year.  The project was started in 2003 and this year marks our 16th year of distributing 
 
dictionaries to all 3rd graders in the Chandler Unified School District.  Over 50,000 dictionaries have been distributed since the project began.  And this year, will be the second year we have the opportunity of including the St. Bonaventure Mission and K-8 School located on the Navajo Nation in Thoreau, New Mexico.
 
What make the project so special is that the Dictionary we distribute contains more than just words and definitions.  It often represents the first book these children are given and contains sections on world geography, civics, multiplication tables, science, the water cycle, planets, states, presidents and even has illustrations for sign language and braille.
 
The teachers have been our #1 supporters as they use the dictionary for class projects and take-home assignments.  Not all the children has access to computers and the dictionary provides them with the ability to do group learning sessions where the children are told to refer to find a word, read the definition, use it in a sentence or sound it out using the phonetics illustrated in the dictionary.  We believe that providing such a dictionary will help each student become better spellers, writers, readers and thinkers. 
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