Dictionary Project receives Daughters of the American Revolution National Community Service Award
Charleston Post & Courier, July 15, 2003

Mary French looks over dictionaries with South Carolina third-graders.

Instructor Magazine
Scholastic, Inc.
March 2003 Page 16

News & Trends
A Dictionary for every child

Mary French believes that if you give the power of words to students, their minds will soar. Learning new words “makes children feel enlightened,” says French. “They crave words.”

The South Carolina mom is trying to satisfy that craving and to empower third-grade students through The Dictionary Project, a nonprofit organization that gives free dictionaries to third-graders in South Carolina. In the six years French has been running the project out of her Charleston, South Carolina, home, she has distributed more than 350,000 dictionaries. Her goal has been to reach every third-grader in South Carolina, every year. Why third grade? French believes that it’s the make-or-break year for children’s literacy.

A dictionary must include the words “courteous” and “respect” for French to consider giving it away. About half the dictionaries she’s looked at don’t. She prefers Webster’s Classic Research Library dictionaries.

French spends 60 hours a week raising funds to buy new dictionaries. In the past nine months, she has received so much publicity in the national press that she has expanded her project to 42 states. Her goal has grown: she now hopes to reach every third grader in the U.S. What’s the best part of the work? Says French: “We are putting words in the hands of children.”

Copyright 2003 by Scholastic, Inc. Used by permission

Dictionary Lady Publishes Her Own School Word List
By Brenda Rindge
Charleston Post & Courier staff

Give a child a dictionary and he'll start looking up words.Chances are, the first thing he'll check out will be expletives, but at least he'll be using the dictionary."A boy wrote to me one time, 'From your dictionary, I learned that "ass" is an animal,' " says Mary French, director of The Dictionary Project. Now French has written her own dictionary.

Known as the Dictionary Lady, French has been responsible for the distribution of 90,000 dictionaries to South Carolina's third-graders since 1995. Nationally, nearly three-quarters of a million dictionaries are in the hands of youngsters as a result of the nonprofit project she runs out of her Mount Pleasant home.

Last year, French started writing a dictionary that gives sample sentences for each word, and the project has taken a long time. "It's hard to edit because there are so many words and so many different contexts," she says. "And formatting has been my biggest problem." Then she learned that McGraw-Hill planned to stop publishing her most popular dictionary. Many publishers, she has found, don't want to spend money on updating and reformatting dictionaries. She took matters into her own hands and published one herself. "We had six weeks to pull together the dictionary," she says. "I'm kind of surprised that we did it."

Called "A Student's Dictionary," it includes nearly 13,000 words from "a" to "zygote." It has information on weights and measures, planets, presidents, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and amendments and maps of the world and the states. "It's hard to find things that are not copyrighted," French says. "We used the CIA (World) Factbook for a lot of information because federal documents don't have copyrights."

Dictionaries — all dictionaries — are ongoing projects as new words come into common usage each year. "I'm in the process of rewriting it and adding all the new words that I've heard about since July," she says. That will include a definition of 'bit' as a mouthpiece for a horse, which was suggested by her daughter's friend. "That's how we create this, from children's input," she says. "A boy wrote once and said we should include information about the planets, so that's in there now."

Last year, she handed out a draft of her work-in-progress dictionary in the western portion of the state. "We got a lot of feedback from the children," she says. "We wanted to know what words they were looking up. You have no idea how interesting that is. We added some of the words they suggested. "'Puppy' is one word we added. We had 'cub' and 'kitten' and 'chick' and other baby animals. It really should have been in there, but it was something we overlooked. A little boy wrote a letter and his reason was, 'I like dogs, but I like puppies more.' "'Ersatz' is another addition suggested by a student."I had never heard it and at first I thought it was a word from Pokemon or something," says French, the mother of a 9-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. "Another word we added was 'communion.' That was suggested by my son's friend."

The way The Dictionary Project works is that French gets businesses and service organizations to donate the money to buy the books. Often, they put their organization's label in them. Many times, the donors distribute the books themselves, but French also pays a lot of visits to elementary schools. Many of the sponsors like the dictionary because it includes the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and amendments, she says. "We started adding the stuff in the back because the children would read it on field trips," French says. "It gives them something to read that's not mandatory, and you can read it in five minutes and you've learned something." No matter how they are using the dictionaries, at least they are using them, she says. "It's always been my philosophy that children at that age are building their frame of reference and need words to be able to do that," she says. "It gives them a better understanding of the world they live in and the different components of it that influence our lives."

Catherine Lawrence,
Charleston Post & Courier, 10/24/2000

Each year, Mary French teaches students across the state a lesson in both the English language and gracious gift-giving. She travels to more than 100 schools and delivers dictionaries to every third-grade student. For the 500 elementary and intermediate schools that French can't get to, she finds someone who can. She also finds a way to pay for the books through grants, donations from businesses and money raised by civic groups. Some call her "Dictionary Lady". She really is a kind of academic Santa Claus.

On a recent fall morning, French paid a visit to students at Berkeley County's Bonner Elementary School. She came bearing several boxes of dictionaries - handpicked to fit the needs of young students learning to read and write. French searches for books which have large print, cost under a dollar, are small enough for growing hands and contain most words that a third-grader uses.

"Every year she does something extremely special for the kids at Bonner Elementary School," Principal Melvin Rose said. Some students greeted French with energy or timid hugs. Others fought drowsy eyes while they traced small fingers through a book's new pages. "You are the first person to touch this dictionary," French said as she asked them to look up a word.

French's dictionaries do not come without a cost - she has a few requirements for the students who receive them. The children must write their name in the book to prevent loss. They must put a mark next to words they look up to track their growing vocabulary. They must write a thank-you note to the business or organization that paid for the book. The thank-you note is important because it keeps dictionaries coming for the next class of students, French said. "It is so important to express gratitude to people who are working to improve your quality of life. These are not hard things to do," she said. The free dictionaries also change the way students look at the people in their community, French said. "They see people around them supporting their education."

French often tells children about her own poor spelling past. When she learned to spell in grade school, no one ever corrected her mistakes. But when she enrolled in Charleston Southern University, her professors demanded perfection, and she began to see her papers returned with red circles around misspelled words. "It didn't even occur to me that I was a bad speller until so many people commented on it," she said. "I was lazy and didn't like to look up words."

Since that time, French has been passionate about giving children the tools to succeed in school. She also believes spelling is a key to higher test scores. "The children of this state deserve the very best teachers and resources. If we set our sights on anything less, we will be disappointed with the results," she said.

French got the idea for the Dictionary Project from a 1995 letter to the editor printed in The Post and Courier. The letter described the need for dictionaries in Charleston County. The project is modeled after a similar program in Savannah. Third grade is the focus because it is the year students begin to work independently, French said. They begin to write, read for pleasure and think creatively. At this stage, a dictionary becomes the first and most useful reference tool a child can own, she said.

Others agree. "Third grade is your target year, especially for boys. They are at their turning point ... They are no longer small children," Rose said. "A book is the ideal gift. People give kids so many things, but we never give them books."

Not all schools welcomed French, especially in the beginning. Some principals didn't return phone calls. Others did not want gifts from strangers. It often caused her frustration, and she turned to local leaders for help. "It is typical of schools that are not making the best use of their resources," she said. "The successful schools use everything to its fullest capacity. They have good leadership and seek good teachers. They acknowledge volunteers and gifts. A good principal lets everyone know you are coming. He meets you at the door."

French started by raising money for dictionaries in Dorchester, Berkeley and Charleston county schools. It was not until the project began to extend beyond the tri-county area that it grew beyond French's grasp. She ordered 2,000 dictionaries for children in a nearby school district, but when the books were delivered, a double order was shipped by mistake. From that error on, the project grew quickly.

French realized early that she could not succeed alone. She drafted the help of businesses, banks and civic groups. Some companies donated large sums; others gave small amounts. It all added up in the end - almost 60,000 dictionaries were delivered in 1999.

"When it first started, it was something that was manageable. I knew that for it to get bigger, other people needed to get involved. It needed to grow beyond me," French said. French called it the "angel factor" - a good project eventually will become larger than its originator because it will take the work of many.

The project also gave French a insider's view of public education. She has seen firsthand programs that work in schools and those that don't. She has met the kinds of leaders who push progress and those who impede it.

French works full time. She writes grant applications, solicits money for the nonprofit organization and delivers dictionaries to the schools throughout the year. The project's goal is to serve all of the state's third-graders each year. Last year, the project met that goal for the first time. The work pays off in the end, according to French.

In a recent morning at Bonner Elementary, third-grader Blake Headden wrote an essay about a ghost. He used his new dictionary to check the long or confusing words in his story. He finished by drawing a small lopsided ghost on the bottom of his paper. His neighbor, a small girl with braids in her hair, hugged her dictionary to her chest. I like this book," she said.

For more information about the Dictionary Project, e-mail: wordpower@dictionaryproject.org

Heather Hare
Charleston Post & Courier

Mary French expanded her Dictionary Project this year with a lot of help from her friends - local Rotary clubs in the state. French began the effort in this area five years ago after reading a letter to the editor in The Post and Courier from Bonnie Beeferman on Hilton Head. The letter was a call to the Charleston area to start something such as the Dictionary Project in the area.

The Dictionary Project provides dictionaries to third-graders every year. At third grade, students begin working independently and should be able to use a dictionary, French said. "All children need to be able to spell," French said. "It's not good enough to be able to write. We have to elevate our expectations for children."

When French read the letter she lived in Summerville, not Charleston, but thought the idea a good one. She set to work trying to get money to fund dictionaries for each third-grader in her county. After a failed attempt at bake sales, she wrote to every business she could find in the area, asking for their help. Only one wrote back: Publix.

Publix told her they wanted to give her $1,200 to buy dictionaries, but she needed nonprofit status. Through friends at Trident Literacy, an organization for which she was a volunteer, she was able to use their nonprofit status to get the money. With the help of the Rotary clubs in the eastern district of South Carolina, French has supplied schools in that area of the state with dictionaries. That totals 85,000 dictionaries.

Many different companies and organizations have helped buy and distribute the dictionaries since French began the project. The Community Foundation Open Grants Program, the Beaufort Fund of the Community Foundation, Publix Supermarkets Charities, Poindexter Insurance Agency, Santee Cooper, the St. Andrews Rotary Club, the Junior League of Charleston, Cummins Engine and the Charleston Chapter of the Links Inc. have all contributed to the effort.
(For a more current list, please click here.)

French says she hopes exposure to dictionaries will help begin a climb in test scores. The students write thank-you notes after receiving their dictionaries. "(Each child) had a really different reason why they needed a dictionary," French said. (To read letters from the children, please click here.)

Heather Hare covers education issues for The Post and Courier. She can be reached at 843-937-5546.