Joan VanArsdalen/Courtesy
An annual project sponsored by the Hillsdale Kiwanis Club is causing a stir of excitement for local students this month. Each fall, the club hands out free reference books to students in all the Hillsdale County schools: dictionaries for third graders, thesauri for seventh graders, and foreign-language dictionaries for high school classes.
“It’s a really great thing that Kiwanis does,” Williams Elementary School principal Josh McDowell said. “Every year our students enjoy it.”
The Hillsdale Kiwanis Club is a local chapter of Kiwanis International, an organization that emphasizes community service. Consisting of about 60 adult members from the area, the club sponsors several local community service projects and clubs in local schools. The Dictionary Project especially fits with the club’s mission to “improve the world one child and one community at a time,” secretary Joan VanArsdalen said. “Our focus is on children.”
The club is delivering about 600 dictionaries and 500 thesauri this year, and it plans to get to all the schools by Thanksgiving. It started participating in the Dictionary Project in 2004 because of classics professor Joseph Garnjobst, who got involved in the project before becoming a Kiwanian.
Garnjobst said he first learned of the project in 2002 from a Wall Street Journal article featuring the project’s development in South Carolina schools where it originated. Inspired, Garnjobst started the program through Eta Sigma Phi, Hillsdale College’s classical studies honorary, which delivered the dictionaries to a local elementary school.
“We put the Greek alphabet in the back of the dictionaries and taught kids how to write their name in the Greek letters,” he said. “It’s like teaching them a secret code. They would write thank you notes, but they would write them in Greek.”
Because of the honorary’s limited resources, Garnjobst said, he looked for another way to sponsor the project. A Kiwanian told him the Kiwanis Club could probably help him out if he joined, so he did. The club then took off with the project, expanding it to all the Hillsdale County schools, including Hillsdale Preparatory School and Will Carleton Academy.
“The first time we did it, the administrators didn’t believe that we were just going to give them the books,” Garnjobst said. “When you say you’d like to give all their students a dictionary, that doesn’t register at first. We just wanted them to have them.”
The dictionaries are published by the Dictionary Project program and include more than just definitions, VanArsdalen said. Students can find the periodic table, maps, state capitals, biographies of U.S. presidents, the Braille alphabet, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution in the dictionaries.
Garnjobst said they give the dictionaries to third graders because that’s when students begin to read for content. Seventh graders receive thesauri, he said, because they’re learning to write.
“It’s good for them to have the tactile information to be able to look something up instead of just relying on their electronics,” Hillsdale Preparatory School third-grade teacher Ginger Russell said. She added that the students use their dictionaries all the way through eighth grade.
Gier Elementary School principal Laurie VanOrman said the students immediately take ownership of their dictionaries.
“We will see them carrying them around for a few weeks because they are proud,” she said in an email, adding that the students use them in the classroom and can eventually take them home.
Garnjobst said he once received a thank you note from a student who said he didn’t want to share the dictionary with his mom.
“The good news is that the parent also wanted to use the dictionary, so it benefits not just the student involved but could potentially benefit the entire household,” Garnjobst said. “Also good news was that the student felt a keen sense of possession, that it was something valuable that the student wanted to keep.”
He noted that something as simple as a dictionary is really a huge gift for a young student.
“If you were a third grader, and someone gave you that and said, ‘Yeah you can keep that, write your name in it’ – you just gave them a whole treasure trove,” he said.
Russell echoed his appreciation for the project.
“We’re just excited that the Kiwanis would care enough to help students at the third-grade level continue their education. It’s a great opportunity,” she said.
