GUILFORD, Maine — For the seventh year, Valley Grange is giving dictionaries to 70 third-graders at SeDoMoCha Elementary School on Oct. 27. The Dictionary Day event aims to encourage empowerment through literacy.
Guilford’s Valley Grange has been a sponsor of the national Dictionary Project for 13 years through its Words for Thirds program, which has provided more than 1,000 free dictionaries to Piscataquis County third-graders.
When the Grange started sponsoring dictionary days for local third-grade classes, program director Walter Boomsma thought students would find the event boring, but he said the student reaction has been just the opposite.
“All of us would be surprised about how empowering kids find these dictionaries to be,” Boomsma said. “It gives them some control in the sense of, ‘This is mine. I can find things in it.’”
According to Boomsma, students are learning to read until third grade. After third grade, students begin reading to learn. That’s why access to a dictionary is critical at that point in a child’s education.
It’s education motives such as this that make SeDoMoCha Elementary School Principal Julie Kimball believe the Grange is a phenomenal source of information and influence for local students.
“It takes our community to help support our school. [The Valley Grange] has been a vital force behind what we’re doing here,” Kimball said.
Participating in Dictionary Day has become a rite of passage for Piscataquis students. Several sixth-graders from SeDoMoCha who received dictionaries through the program three years ago will talk at the Oct. 27 event about how the dictionaries have affected them.
“[The sixth-graders] are able to share their experience over the last three years, and the third-graders realize that [the dictionary] goes beyond just ‘the now.’ It’s a resource that you can use forever,” Kimball said. “Sometimes hearing that from adults isn’t as powerful as hearing it from kids around their own age.”
Students at the SeDoMoCha event will be presented with a history lesson about the Grange’s longstanding tradition as a grass-roots community organization. The Grange itself is a national organization founded in 1875, when local farmers organized to create rural free delivery, which delivered mail to rural farms and was the start of the United States Postal Service.
As a nod to history, students at the event will open a mailbox at Valley Grange containing a letter addressed to the SeDoMoCha third-grade class. Inside the letter will be a Grange-related word the student likely will not know. At that point, the students will be given their personal dictionaries to look up the word and read the definition aloud, representing the first use of their new dictionaries.
“In our modern world, it is often over assumed that students have access to the Internet,” Kimball said.
As one of Maine’s most rural counties, access to the Internet is not always available for Piscataquis County students. By distributing dictionaries, the Grange continues its commitment to its rural community, much like it did more than 150 years ago with the establishment of rural free delivery.
“The thank-you notes we get would break your heart,” Boomsma said, recounting a particular instance in which a student wrote the dictionary she received from the Grange was the only book her family had in the house.
Each year the Grange purchases dictionaries from the Dictionary Project for $2.50 each, annually spending about $600. The Grange funds the dictionaries through fundraisers and individual donations.
“People find this to be an incredibly cool program and are willing to support it,” Boomsma said.