Earlier this month, over 350 Ravenswood City School District third-graders went home with a little something extra—their own personal dictionaries donated by the California Dictionary Project.

Over twenty volunteers—professionals from local chapter of Links Incorporated, an international service organization-- joined principals, District staff and classroom teachers to personally deliver the dictionaries to the eager students. 

The California Dictionary Project’s mission is to donate and distribute dictionaries annually to third-graders in California’s public schools; thus far, they have given 83,000 dictionaries throughout Bay Area schools. This was the first time Ravenswood students received dictionaries.

Students faces lit up when presented with their dictionaries and volunteers engaged them by playing games to get the kids thumbing through their new acquisitions right away. With these tools, volunteers hope that the Project’s motto—“Today a Reader: Tomorrow a Leader”—will soon ring true as students learn to fall in love with reading and vocabulary on their own.