BY CLIFF SMELLEY
Telegraph Staff Writer
How do you define “success?”
Third-grade students in Bradford County receive the tools every year to be able to look it up, thanks to the Kiwanis Club of Starke, which offers up an example of success with its annual dictionary project.
For the 17th year, club members visited Bradford schools to present a dictionary to each third-grade student.
The project began in 2006. Cheryl Canova, who was then the club president, attended leadership training when the idea of such a project was put forth by the then Florida Kiwanis governor. The Starke club was the first in the state to participate.
“I am thankful that our club still does this project,” Canova said. “It is one of my favorite projects that we do every year.”
Canova said it was decided at that time to give the dictionaries to third-grade students as that was when students first took the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (students now take Florida Standards Assessments, also beginning in third grade).
Each dictionary bears a Kiwanis label inside the front cover on which the student’s name is handwritten.
“It is a lot of work, but putting the stickers with the children’s names in each book seems to make the kids even happier,” Canova said.
The dictionaries the Kiwanis Club of Starke purchased this year — “A Student’s Dictionary and Animal Gazetteer” — are more than dictionaries. They contain such things as punctuation, weights and measures, periodic table of elements, multiplication table, the 50 United States, maps of the world, sign language and information about animals and habitats.
One of the pages in the dictionaries contains the longest word in the English language (a scientific formula), which amazes students when Kiwanis Club members point it out to them.
Like Canova, club member Cliff Smelley said presenting dictionaries to students is one of his favorite Kiwanis activities.
“It’s amazing to watch the children immediately begin to look through their dictionaries as soon as they receive them,” said Smelley, who has helped deliver dictionaries most every year since the project’s inception. “Sometimes, we even get hugs after passing out the dictionaries. The children are so visibly excited that it just makes your day.”
