It doesn’t take a state test to tell us whether or not a child is a
good reader. Good readers are the children you see reading on the bus, in
the back seat of the car, in the waiting room at the dentist’s
office. They read because they want to. No one has to monitor their reading
or test their comprehension. These young people do well in school. They
test at the top of the field. Their attention spans are long. They tend to
be independent thinkers. Our top students spend an hour or more reading
every day because they want to. For the most part, our lowest-performing
students don’t read anything except what they are forced to read in
school. This huge difference in successful, independent reading experience
is at the heart of our nation’s achievement gap. We are changing
this.
100 Book Challenge is a system designed to get all of our students into the
habit of successful independent reading every day. This habit requires
access to the right books, at the right times, with the right kinds of
social supports. 100 Book Challenge gets students, their families and their
teachers to develop the avid reading lifestyle for the rewards it brings.
Our book leveling system uses a phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension
infrastructure, catalogued on Skills Cards to support student, teacher and
parent learning. As student read for pleasure, their teachers and parents
learn to help them master the sophisticated reader response frameworks
required by our high-stakes testing.
Our results have been nothing short of phenomenal. When students who
haven’t enjoyed reading and haven’t done much of it in the
past, begin to read by the hour, they make extraordinary progress—rapidly.
At the core of our philosophy is the basic premise that reading is
more than a set of skills, it’s a lifestyle. 100 Book Challenge
teaches the avid reader lifestyle, creating lifelong learners, one book at
a time.
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