Last week I traveled back in time and landed slap-dab in the middle of elementary school. When I was in third grade the Internet didn’t exist and bell-bottoms and pet rocks were all the rage. Seriously.
Local female bloggers, myself included, joined forces with PositiveDetroit.Net in collaboration with Operation: Kid Equip to provide third graders in Oakland County with dictionaries.
We’ve fully funded the first city in the project, Ferndale, and we began delivering the dictionaries to the students.
As we walked into Ferndale’s John F. Kennedy Elementary School and made our way to the media room the memories flooded back to me. I remembered how much I loved school and learning. And I remembered the late 70's.
Media Room? We had a tiny filmstrip projector and a movie projector that were tucked away in the closet. Yet, we still all fought to be “Captain Audio Visual” as if it were a superhero designation.
The kids gathered in the room and the Principal at JFK, Nancy M. DeRousha, explained why we were there. She told them that we didn’t have any ties to them personally but that we wanted to give them dictionaries.
The appreciation and joy the kids showed was overwhelming. One of the children said that it was like “someone they didn’t know loved them.”
When asked if they knew what a blog was about half of the kids raised their hands! They described it eloquently as "your own website where you can write what you want." What a perfect answer!
They gave hugs, they paged through the dictionaries, and they said thank you. They were inquisitive, smiling, and grateful.
This project is about equipping children with a basic tool, a dictionary, to help them succeed. The power of the written word is immense; words can inspire, encourage, and give hope. We need to maximize the potential of every child in our community.
These children are going to be teachers, doctors, leaders, and writers. I’m betting a few of them will become bloggers too.
Yes, third grade was a very long time ago for me. We didn’t have magical phones that you could use anywhere, computers, or a decent fashion sense. We had a CB radio in our house (we had a phone too, I'm not that old!), our typewriter wrote in cursive, and I wore my “Disco Sucks” t-shirt proudly.
Times and technology have changed but some things haven’t. As I type away on my laptop it’s easy to forget that many of these children don’t have computers at home or internet access. They can’t surf over to dictionary.com.
There are many more communities in Oakland County that still need to be funded. Twenty dollars, otherwise known as a week of Starbucks, would buy 8 of these children dictionaries. Will you help?
Please join Operation: Kid Equip, Erin Rose, Nikki Stephan, Lauren Weber, Jennifer Wright, and me in providing dictionaries to these students by donating here.
Becks Davis