Founded in 2002, the California Dictionary Project is a nonprofit organization whose goal is to improve student literacy by annually delivering dictionaries to all third-graders in the California public school system. On April 6 it was Canoas Elementary School's turn. To date the project has handed out 31,000 dictionaries, including the 4,700 distributed throughout the San Jose Unified School District this month.

At Canoas, the dictionary distribution was augmented by classroom visits from San Jose Unified School District administrators, who showed students how to use their new resource tool to their best advantage. District board member Veronica Lewis had third-graders in Amy Schwender's class looking up words such as "molt" and "malapropism" and reading the definitions aloud.

"Put a dot next to the words you've looked up," Lewis said. "Do it every day and before you know it, your whole book will have dots on it."

The project provides students with both English and Spanish-English dictionaries. San Jose Unified School District Superintendent-elect Don Iglesias, who visited with bilingual third- and fourth-graders in Sandra Tatum's class, said owning a dictionary helps bilingual students become fluent in English.

"It's also fun for kids because this [dictionary] is their own," Iglesias added.

Students are encouraged to write their names in their dictionaries to add to this sense of ownership.

The project also distributed dictionaries in the district last year, when volunteers made classroom visits to Gardner Elementary School. Superintendent Linda Murray was on hand for both distribution days; at Canoas she visited JoAnn Price's third- and fourth-grade combination class.

"It's a good opportunity to get into the classroom and to get volunteers from the community into the classroom so they can see what an important effort this is," Murray said. "It encourages others to get involved in the classroom and see the ways they can influence the lives of children with an idea that's simple in concept but deep in what it can mean for a child."

The project's founders were inspired by the work of Mary French, founder of South Carolina's Dictionary Project. They were also spurred into action by a statistic showing that 53 percent of California's third-graders read below the national grade level.

California Dictionary Project president Mark Robinson said the classroom visits help show school communities that his organization is committed to the cause of literacy.

"We think it's meaningful, and kids and teachers think it's meaningful," Robinson said.