Dartmouth's third graders may have an easier time finding the perfect word for essays after this week. The Dartmouth Grange arranged for 312 dictionaries to be distributed to every single third grader in the district.

Any extras were donated to classrooms and school libraries, said Dartmouth Grange Chair of Home and Community Service Elizabeth Newton.

“The belief is that [third grade] is the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn, and that’s why we do third grade,” Newton said.

The Dictionary Project is a nonprofit organization that was started in 1992 by Annie Plummer of Savannah, Georgia, who provided 50 dictionaries to children attending a school close to her home. She continued giving this gift each year, raising money to donate 17,000 dictionaries for children in Savannah in her lifetime. Since its implementation in 1995, The Dictionary Project has provided over 18 million children with dictionaries all over the United States.

Grange volunteers Sharon Andrade and Wendy Holmes gave their time to distribute the dictionaries to the four third grade classrooms at Potter on Wednesday morning.

Assistant Principal Richard Porter was very enthusiastic about the kids receiving dictionaries. “It’s different than looking up something online. In the time it take for them to start up and login, they’ve already found it [in the dictionaries]. They’ll definitely use them.”

The students all accepted a dictionary, each giving the Grange volunteers a handshake and a heartfelt “thank you.”

“I like all these handshakes,” Porter quipped. “Very polite.”

Holmes and Andrade also took the time to promote the Grange and the services it provides to the community. They extolled the excellence of Dartmouth’s Junior Grange program as well.

“I believe it’s the largest Junior Grange in the state," said Holmes.

With about 13 recruits, the Junior Grange puts on a variety of activities like Halloween celebrations and winter potluck events, as well as putting in hours of community work and selling produce at Alderbrook Farm.

The third graders of Potter Elementary are no strangers to working the land. The students have been involved with maintaining a community garden that has grown a variety of plants like tomatoes and pumpkins.

The Dartmouth Grange, and the National Grange, have been participating in The Dictionary Project for several years.

The Grange personalized its involvement in the project, not only providing each third grader with a dictionary of his or her own to keep, but also included a bookplate that shows it was donated by the Grange in memory of Winifred Manley, a former secretary of the Dartmouth Grange, commemorating her “Service to the Grange and the Readers of Dartmouth.”

The remainder of the dictionaries will be distributed on Thursday to Joseph DeMello Elementary and on Friday to James M. Quinn Elementary.