BYRON TOWNSHIP — Marisa Spetoskey is sure she’s going to get a lot of use out of a recent gift.

“If you’re wondering about how to spell a word, you can look it up, or you can find out what the meaning of a word is,” said Marisa, a third-grader at Countryside Elementary School.

She and 310 other third-graders throughout the Byron Center school district received pocket-sized dictionaries from the Byron Rotary Club.

Bob Sloma, president of J.S. Die &Mold in Byron Township, said one of the Rotary Club’s focuses this year is literacy. Sloma, chairman of the committee that organized the giveaway, said the Rotarians raised about $1,000 from local businesses, which was enough money to provide 600-page, pocket-sized Scholastic dictionaries to the third-graders in public and private schools within district boundaries.

Heidi Morrell, a third-grade teacher at Brown Elementary, said her students were excited to receive the dictionaries.

“A lot of them don’t have updated dictionaries at home,” she said.

Countryside Elementary third-grader Rebecaa Rose said she will use her dictionary when writing to a pen pal.

“You can look up a word if you don’t know how to spell it,” she said.

Sloma said the Byron Rotary Club plans to organize a book collection for the Grand Rapids school district and also will host a literacy poster contest for local fifth- and sixth-graders.