According to second-grade teacher Randy Russell, students earn points for each book they’ve read and passed an online Accelerated Reader test provided by Renaissance Learning Inc., which has more than 140,000 quizzes on specific books in its database. Points range from one-half point for smaller books up to 15 or 20 points for more advanced reads, such as the Harry Potter series. For every 20 points, they staple a basketball to the bulletin board, and every basketball can be traded in for school supplies, a book, CD, DVD or video game available at the school Book Fair the week before spring break.
For the whole month, Russell and the other teachers said, students have used every spare moment to get a few more paragraphs in. The star in his class has been Francesca Dishueme, who has logged more than 200 books.
“The potential of picking something from the book fair really helps a lot,” Russell said.
Not only have the students been improving their reading skills, but also learning some competitive strategies. Barb Reimer’s third-grade class, for instance, came up with a last-minute secret weapon to gain an edge by having every student take the AR test on U.S. history book, worth five points per pupil, that the teacher read to the class.
“A lot of them have been bringing in AR books that they have at home to share,” Reimer said. “It’s hard to compete with sixth-graders because most of our books are only worth a half a point.
“We haven’t taken up too much class time because they do a lot of reading on their own.”
Nevertheless, her top student, Kaitlyn Goins, read 67 books to lead her class with 31.2 points.
Sixth-grader Michael Portillo earned 104 points by working his way through 14 chapter books, including the first six Harry Potter books, but finished behind classmate Alex Treadway’s 110 points, as the top scorers in the school.
But their power reading didn’t help Sharon Berger’s sixth-grade class in the competition, as they were overtaken them in the final day by Reimer’s third-graders.
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