Students tend to turn to the Internet for spelling and word questions in the technology age, but there’s still nothing like the basics.

That’s why Old Ford Ruritan Club decided to distribute brand new dictionaries to every third grader at John Cotten Tayloe Elementary School.

Ruritan Club President Jeff Mault said the idea came from a nationwide initiative called The Dictionary Project, which is out of Charleston, South Carolina, and strives to make students better readers, writers and thinkers by giving them personal dictionaries.

He said the club usually tries to tackle local needs, rather than national, so they decided to donate the dictionaries to a local school.

“We try to look at community needs,” Mault said. “We thought that would be a good cause, and the third-grade teachers were really excited about it.”

On Monday morning, members of the Ruritan Club visited the third-grade classrooms at John Cotten Tayloe and hand-delivered the dictionaries to the students, he said.

“We went to each classroom and told them a little bit about the Ruritan Club and who we are,” Mault said. He estimated there were nearly 300 third graders at the school at the start of this school year.

Heather Williams, a third-grade teacher at John Cotten Tayloe, said she thinks it’s important for students to know the basic skills of how to use a dictionary to look up words. She said relying solely on the Internet is not a good idea, as students need to know what to do when technology fails.

“That’s the problem. They’re not learning basic skills,” Williams said. “It helps build their thinking skills.”

The teachers were able to select which dictionary they wanted out of about six or seven choices and selected a dictionary-thesaurus combination, she said.

“It comes in handy because the kids are learning about antonyms and synonyms,” Williams said.

“They were so tickled pink with it,” she said, adding that one could hear the students’ excitement.

“It’s nice having the community come in and help,” Williams said. “We are just very grateful, thankful, to the Ruritans for doing this.”