A committee selects ten books that are age appropriate for each grade division of the contest. You may want to start with only one age division initially, such as students in grades 6 through 8.
You need to make sure copies of the books are available for all competing students.
Outside judges and library media specialists can develop the questions. Find two or three outside readers who will develop ten questions for each set of challenges. The library media specialists also develop ten questions. Questions should get more difficult as students progress through the three rounds of the competition, school finals, district play-offs, and district finals. Encourage the people who develop questions to focus on comprehension rather than factual recall.
Each team of five students who practice developing questions and answers with teammates and a coach.
Each team selects a captain, who will serve as spokesperson for the group and answer the questions at the competition after consulting with team members.
A local business might be recruited to help pay for books, trophies, and/or certificates. Local restaurants might donate food for the reception following the district finals, to make the celebration more meaningful.
Televising the finals on local cable-access TV generates excitement. It also enables parents to watch from home. Students can watch the finals from their schools, and those not yet involved can learn about the Book Bowl.
The winners from the school finals compete against other school finalists in the district play-offs. The four high scoring teams from the district play-offs then challenge one another in the district finals, held at the New Haven city hall. The local cable-access channel broadcasts the finals live.
All participants receive certificates for the voluntary competition. All the district play-off participants receive medals, and all district finalists go home with trophies. A large trophy for the grand prize travels to the winning school each year.
NATIONAL LIBRARY POWER SCHOOL
The Book Bowl got its start in 1995. Gail Hall, a library media specialist at West Hills Middle School in New Haven, borrowed the idea from the Battle of the Books competition held in a nearby community. The contest isn't new, she says. She speculates that it originated during the 1940s as a radio show contest.
"The Book Bowl really has become a hallmark of the New Haven public schools' reading program because kids do it voluntarily," Hall said. "It is a collaboration opportunity to reach out to the schools, to reach out to each other and to the community. It epitomizes the Library Power concept!"
The National Library Power Program promotes the creation of new public elementary school and middle school library programs that improve the quality of services for children. In 1994, New Haven became one of 19 Library Power school districts in the nation. As part of the national program, the New Haven Public Education Fund received $1.2 million in a three-year grant from DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. The foundation has poured $40 million in grants into the 19 Library Power districts.
The Book Bowl is one aspect of Library Power and New Haven's eight-year plan, 2001: A Library Media Odyssey, to revitalize its library media services. Dr. Reginald Mayo, New Haven superintendent of schools, initiated the plan in 1993.
The primary purpose of the Library Media Odyssey is to put a library media center in every school and to staff it with a full-time, certified library media specialist, Derry said. When the program began seven years ago, New Haven had 12 library media specialists. Today, there are 39. Next year, the plans call for putting a specialist in each of the city's 46 schools, Derry said.
Other goals include increasing the number of volumes in book and reference collections, integrating the library into the school curriculum, promoting parental and community involvement, and supplementing and enriching classroom involvement.
Library Power agreed to donate up to $10 per pupil for library allocation if the city matched it, Derry said. In 1993, per pupil allocation was $2.20. With the Library Power donation and the city's matching funds, the allocation increased to $20 per pupil in 1997. "Dr. Reginald Mayo was the key here," Derry said. "He agreed to [increase] the allocation per pupil."
Other sources helped fund New Haven's efforts to improve library media services. The New Haven Public Education Fund, the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, and the Carolyn Foundation also contributed.
The University of Wisconsin in Madison is conducting research that is evaluating the impact of the National Library Power Program. Preliminary findings indicate libraries can be transformed from a passive and supplemental role to a central teaching and learning capacity.
Fleet Bank also supports the Book Bowl. The bank provides funds and a site for the Book Bowl reception. A vice-president of the bank, Jeff Klaus, hosts the finals. The bank's contribution has helped the city purchase trophies and books.
New Haven schools continue to improve their library media services. "The state said we can't continue to have outdated materials in these schools," Derry said. Two years ago, when the three-year grant from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation ran out, the state of Connecticut kicked in another $1.2 million to buy books for elementary school library media centers.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES
The American Library Association The American Library Association site offers information about a variety of issues that pertain to library and media services.
American Association of School Librarians This site offers news and information, including Professional Resources , and Internet Resources for school library media specialists. It also offers a link to its journal, School Library Media Research .
Article by Diane Weaver Dunne Education World® Copyright © 2007 Education World
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On the Podcast: Creating Joyful Classroom Reading CommunitiesIn this episode, we explore the pitfalls of reading incentives and how they can undermine intrinsic motivation and create a culture of winners and losers. Instead, discover how to build a supportive and equitable reading community that truly values the joy of reading. Tune in for this thought-provoking audiobook sample from The Joy of Reading by Donalyn Miller and Terry Lesesne. Below is a transcript of the episode: In some schools reading competitions and contests offer the only community-wide attempts to celebrate reading or young readers. Students must reach a certain reading goal such as reading so many books, pages, or hours, and document proof or pass an assessment, and when they do, they receive better grades or earn prizes and awards. Children who do not meet such goals receive lower grades, punishment, or the public humiliation of failing to earn a desired reward. Such competitions send powerful messages to both the young readers who win and those who don't. First, that reading is not worth doing unless you can win a prize doing it. Second, if you can't read well enough to win a prize or if you lack access to resources that would help, you are a failure. Instead of fostering an inclusive reading community, incentives and contests for reading, create a culture of reading winners and losers. Research on the negative effects of external rewards on reading motivation shows that manipulating learners through extrinsic rewards and punishments, including the withholding of rewards, impedes real learning and seems most damaging to long-term motivation when the task being rewarded is already intrinsically motivating, like reading as noted in cones, punished by rewards. Unfortunately, these misguided contests and competitions continue often disguised as summer reading programs and battle of the book contests that control children's reading choices and misrepresent why reading matters. Simply put, rewarding reading indicates only that you do not believe reading is innately rewarding, or you do not trust kids with their own reading lives or both. Why any school would decide to set its students onto such a path of reading shame and failure is hard to understand. One particular example of the damaging effects of incentives and competitions that is close to my heart is the 40-Book Challenge. I described this student-focused reading challenge in my first book, The Book Whisperer. I explained that at the beginning of the school year, I voiced an expectation to my students that they would read 40 books from a variety of genres and then a variety of formats. My classroom centered independent reading used research-based practices for engaging children with reading and supported students informing a vibrant reading community. The result was that students were excited to read as many books as they could. In the decades since the book's publication, however, I've seen the 40-Book Challenge corrupted into a competition and incentive program in classrooms that don't center independent reading or support reading communities. The effect has been what you might expect, a joyless rush through as many books as possible with students competing against each other rather than forming a supportive community. Something that was originally used successfully to expand students' reading lives and build community had been turned into something that limited students' reading lives and damaged community, all because it had been infused with competition. I am unlikely to express how harmful this is to readers better than I did in a 2014 blog post. Writing the 40-Book Challenge isn't an assignment you can simply add to outdated, ineffective teaching practices. The book challenge rests on the foundation of a classroom reading community built on research-based practices for engaging children with reading. Assigning a 40-Book Challenge as a way to generate grades or push children into reading in order to compete with their classmates, corrupts everything I have written and said about reading. The 40-Book Challenge is meant to expand students' reading lives, not limit or define it. The 40-Book Challenge is a personal challenge for each student, not a contest or competition between students or classes. In every competition or contest, there are winners and losers. Why would we communicate to our students that they are reading losers? For some students, reading 40 books is an impossible leap from where they start as readers and for others, it's not a challenge at all. If Alex read two books in fourth grade and reads 22 in fifth grade, I am celebrating with him. What an accomplishment. Look how much Alex grew. He didn't grow because he read more books. He grew because he had 22 successful reading experiences. Conversely, when Haley read 55 books in fourth grade, reading 40 books in fifth grade isn't challenging her. Encouraging Haley to read biographies and historical fiction, which she claims to detest, does more to stretch her than simply reading more books. Honestly, I don't care if all of my students read 40 books or not. What matters is that students grow and evolve as readers and increase their competence, confidence, and reading motivation through their daily participation in our reading community. From an equity and inclusion standpoint, school contests also erode communities in school by ignoring the economic disparities and differences in access to resources between our students. Students with piles of books at home, library cards, and caregivers who can attend school literacy events during the day or read the likely English-only contest materials always have the advantage. Driving a wedge between groups of students, contests uphold the power and status of a few predominantly white and affluent families, teachers or administrators, and do little to improve the overall literacy outcomes or reading culture of the school. Donalyn Miller’s work champions self-selected independent reading, providing guidance and resources that foster children’s love of reading and the development of positive reading identities. A national and international consultant and bestselling author, Donalyn’s published works include The Book Whisperer (Jossey-Bass, 2009), Reading in the Wild (Jossey-Bass, 2013), and Game Changer: Book Access for All Kids (co-written with Colby Sharp, Scholastic, 2018) as well as articles in Gifted Child International, Education Week Teacher, The Reading Teacher, Voices From the Middle, Educational Leadership, Horn Book, School Library Journal , and The Washington Post. Recipient of TCTELA’s Elementary Language Arts Teacher of the Year (2011) and TCTELA’s Edmund J. Farrell Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award (2018) (for her contributions to the language arts teaching profession). Donalyn is also a co-founder of The Nerdy Book Club , an online community which provides inspiration, book recommendations, resources, and advice about raising and teaching young readers. Donalyn and her husband, Don, live in Texas atop a dragon’s hoard of books. You can connect with her on her website BookWhisperer.com , or on Twitter at @DonalynBooks . Topics: Podcast , Donalyn Miller , The Joy of Reading , podcasts Recent PostsPopular posts, related posts, on the podcast: supporting multilingual learners, on the podcast: engaging students with book clubs, on the podcast: finding the right teaching job. © 2023 Heinemann, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt What is READBowl?Readbowl is the free global reading competition where prek-12th grade aged teams around the globe compete to read for the most minutes. the competition begins the week before the american college football national championship (2nd monday in january) and culminates with a live crowning of the world champions of reading on the morning of the national football league’s (nfl) super bowl sunday.. ONE PAGE OVERVIEW OF READBowl READBowl VIII Kicks Off January 13 2025. NEW FOR 2025: New Conference and Championship for HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS VARSITY CONFERENCE: 9th-12th GRADES If you are a high school educator please email us at [email protected]. We will get back to you asap when these new registration options are live! If you are a PreK-8th Grade Educator, you can sign up right now! READBowl VIII (2024) featured 280,000 students from a ll 50 US States and 14 Different Countries 181,579,472 Minutes of Reading Special Report from ESPN’s Mike Reiss Sign Up for READBowlNew to our programs? Sign up as a new educator. Existing Educator Login ParticipantsMinutes read, readbowl is powered by. Send us a Message!Share the Magic Foundation 1776 Peachtree St NW, Suite 420N Atlanta, GA 30309 (678) 974-2668 Add Impact To Your Inbox!Reading ContestsHold a friendly reading competition everyone can get involved in! Creating a reading contest is a perfect way to motivate readers. These programs are great for year-round, holding multiple contests throughout the year, or you can hold them seasonally. You can have them compete in a multitude of ways. For schools:Grade levels Rival Schools Students in one classroom For libraries:Popular sports teams in town Family Feuds These programs are easy to set-up and fun to run. Students love to be updated on who is winning by seeing the Leaderboard, it makes them want to read more! It’s a great idea to frequently post updates on social media or even pull it up for the class to see occasionally. You can run contest two different ways, you can have readers compete against each other individually, or you can have Groups compete against each other. Here's how to create a Reading Contest:1 . Create a new Program and choose Quick Start.
We are using teams for this example so we chose Group vs. Group.
9 . This is an optional step to collect additional data.
Adding other Groups (Teams)
View the Leaderboard.
Like the regular reading programs, you can still create an incentive for all readers by triggering awards around different progress points throughout the contest. Students will love to brag about their progress awards and where they are on the leader board. The other students will be dying to work harder! You can either create the awards to just be awards an images,you can put things such as “Come claim your prize!” and have little prizes or pieces of candy, or you can even partner with local businesses and change the image to be a QR code for a free ice cream or deal at a local shop. We're happy to answer specific questions and help you create and mange your reading programs. Terms & Conditions Privacy Policy 1-800-824-4789 Download the Reader Zone App: The Reading Is FUN Program"where every child is everyone's child", like us on facebook, click here >, i'm a title. click here to edit me. I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me to add your own content and make changes to the font. Feel free to drag and drop me anywhere you like on your page. I’m a great place for you to tell a story and let your users know a little more about you. This is a great space to write long text about your company and your services. You can use this space to go into a little more detail about your company. Talk about your team and what services you provide. Tell your visitors the story of how you came up with the idea for your business and what makes you different from your competitors. Make your company stand out and show your visitors who you are. At Wix we’re passionate about making templates that allow you to build fabulous websites and it’s all thanks to the support and feedback from users like you! Keep up to date with New Releases and what’s Coming Soon in Wixellaneous in Support. Feel free to tell us what you think and give us feedback in the Wix Forum. If you’d like to benefit from a professional designer’s touch, head to the Wix Arena and connect with one of our Wix Pro designers. Or if you need more help you can simply type your questions into the Support Forum and get instant answers. To keep up to date with everything Wix, including tips and things we think are cool, just head to the Wix Blog! The Reading Is Fun Program Schenectady, New York “Where every child is everyone’s child” First Annual Report
January 2014–January 2015 Program Overview Acting with vision and vigor, The Reading Is Fun Program (RIF) has made enormous strides toward its goal of becoming a permanent, integral part of the civic life of Schenectady and the learning life of Schenectady children. Currently, 70 Schenectady families are signed up to participate in the all-volunteer, free Reading Is Fun Program. Its 65 volunteers have been assigned families to contact and schedule meetings in public venues (library branches, Boys and Girls Club sites, churches, etc.) and begin working with "their" children and parents or other principal caregivers to teach reading-readiness (identifying letters, letter sounds, and letter combinations) and conversational skills and vocabulary—principally by the method of play, one-on-one, once weekly for 30–60 minutes. RIF has also evolved to have its volunteers go into Schenectady City School District elementary schools' after-school programs for 4-year-old pre-kindergartners and 5-year-old kindergartners to teach select students identified by the classroom teachers as needing extra help. This facet of RIF activities is beginning in the week of Feb. 2 in Lincoln Elementary School, where 2 pre-K and 8 K children will be taught by 7 RIF volunteers and, at RIF's request, the school's principal and its coordinator for community and family affairs. Howe and Pleasant Valley Elementary Schools are slated to be next. Partnerships RIF has established partnerships as follows: The Schenectady City School District has conducted three volunteer training sessions with the promise of more as needed, provided RIF with teaching materials, is showcasing RIF on the district website, Facebook page and e-News formats, and is arranging background checks for the growing cohort of RIF volunteers. The Schenectady City School District Education Foundation has agreed to allow RIF to operate under its 501(c)3 umbrella. The First United Methodist Church in downtown Schenectady is providing RIF with office space and teaching venues at no charge, with the local GE Elfun Society expected to donate a computer system for the RIF office. The Schenectady Police Department, the Schenectady County Sheriff's Office, and the Schenectady Federation of Teachers have agreed to advocate among their ranks for volunteer teachers for RIF, with the goal also of fostering better relations especially between the police and other uniformed services and minority communities in the city. The Schenectady Boys and Girls Club is providing RIF with teaching venues and free-of-charge liability insurance for all the RIF volunteers. RIF has partnerships also with the historic (National Registry) Proctors Theatre in Schenectady, to help RIF build its stock of donated children's books and to provide a venue for RIF activities, and with the Blue Roses Theatre in the John Sayles School for the Fine Arts at Schenectady High School, to provide reading-relevant performance programming. More partnerships are anticipated. Public Relations and Raising of Funds and In-Kind Donations The RIF logo of the Book Worm artwork, displayed prominently on the RIF website and Facebook page, has been donated. The design and management of the RIF Facebook page (The Reading Is Fun Program) and website ( http://www.readingisfun.org ) have been donated. More than 900 children's books and sundry educational apparatus and writing supplies have already been donated, with more anticipated. $15,000 in grants and individual donations have been raised, with more anticipated to meet varied program teaching needs and to hire one or two part-time salaried personnel to manage the increasingly complex RIF central administration. RIF Looks Ahead RIF's goals and plans for the next 3-5 years are to broaden its activities, as follows: to have ever more RIF volunteers work with ever more Schenectady families and their 4-year-olds who are not yet enrolled in district schools; to embed RIF volunteers in the after-school programs of all nine elementary schools in the city, to work there with 4- and 5-year-olds enrolled in the school district's pre-K and K classes, and, where possible, with the children's parents or other principal caregivers present; to have RIF volunteers work in all the elementary schools' after-school programs with youngsters in Grades 1, 2, and 3 who are deemed by the classroom teachers as needing additional help in learning reading-readiness and conversational skills and vocabulary, again, where possible, with the children's parents or other principal caregivers present—to help counter the propensity of many third-graders across the nation to fall off the reading and math tracks and never get back on, with insidious effects for the youngsters' later lives, their communities, and the nation; to explore the possibility of transforming RIF from a 10-month (September–June) program into a year-round (September–August) program, to improve the prospects that its pre-K, K, and Grades 1, 2, and 3 student participants will not suffer a diminution in reading skills over the summer hiatus between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next one; and to periodically mount Reading Rallies in public venues around the city, comprising clusters of 4- and 5-year-olds and their parents or other principal caregivers and volunteer teachers, to engage in reading-related activities, and a Grand Reading Jamboree, to be held in a public venue each year in June, comprising all the youngsters in RIF and their parents or other principal caregivers and all the volunteer teachers, again to engage in reading-related activities, with all the youngsters receiving awards for having participated in the program. The Reading Is Fun Program Board of Directors Al Magid Founder and Executive Director Mary Lou Russo Chief Operating Officer Phyllis Holzhauer Director for Community Outreach Nicki Foley Director for Communications Gordon Zuckerman Finance administrator, Liaison from the Schenectady City School District Education Foundation Kate Abbott Liaison from the Schenectady City School District Director for Instructional Support Services |
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Parents and teachers, if you have questions about the quizzes or the Reading is fun! program send an e‐mail to D oug Church. ... Reading Level: 1-4 5-8 9-12 All. Book Title Author Levels Quiz : 101 Questions About Ellen White: E.G.White Estate: 9-12: 101 Questions About Ellen White (E.G.White Estate)-quiz.doc : 20 Questions God Wants To Ask ...
Try one of these fun book report ideas: a book report cake, a clothes hanger mobile, or even a book report charm bracelet. 7. Read your way across the map. This is one of our favorite Read Across America activities. Students get to choose reading activities and color in the map of the USA as they complete each activity.
Decide your contest theme, type, and time frame. Pick your theme from our ready-made challenge templates or work with your dedicated school success manager to design your own. Decide if you'll set a reading list of specific titles, like your state's award winners, and if so, which ones. Then, set your contest timeline, making sure to mark ...
11. Easy record keeping. Make recording what books students are reading painless for both the students and you. Use a "status of the class" or book log. You can also have students keep a reading log that has the title, author, date finished, and star review. 12.
The object of the game is for one player to end up with one of each of the six cards. Rules of play: • To start, shuffle the cards and deal 7 cards to each player. • Put the extra cards in a pile at the center of the table. • The dealer begins play by drawing one card from the top of the center pile.
Reading challenges or reading competitions offer a solution to this problem for any grade level, whether they are elementary school, middle school, or high school students. For more than 100 years, these programs have promoted community literacy and helped establish a culture of reading - and recently, they've received an upgrade.
12 Creative Book Report Projects Your Students Will Love. April 20, 2022 admin. Whether you're teaching a whole-class novel, or finishing a round of independent reading or literature circles, post-reading assessments are always more engaging when they're more than just a test or essay. Below, you'll discover a dozen fun book report ideas ...
Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge. Here's a great way to keep kids engaged in summer reading - The Scholastic Summer Read-a-Palooza! Kids are encouraged to track their reading in a free online Scholastic-provided resource with books, games and events. As kids reach tracking goals, they receive rewards and unlock book donations for others.
AtoZ Reading Challenge. Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge. Back to the Classics Challenge. Black Book Card Challenge. Flourish and Blotts 2022 Harry Potter Challenge - The Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s) Reading Challenge. Beat the Backlist Reading Challenge. Books in the Freezer Horror Challenge.
Click to open. 7. Book cover. Here, students get to be creative and invent their own book cover (front and back) of the book they just read. Or maybe just a cover for of a piece of text you've read out loud. They can use the whiteboard tools: pencil, type tool, switch colors, add images, etc. Click to open. 8.
Assigned reading helps students develop their critical analysis skill, and book reports test their progress. But it is not enough to simply analyze a literary work — you also need to express your creativity while presenting book report ideas. ... And to make sure you get the highest score for your project, we prepared five fun book report ...
First, pick a number of books to tackle. Younger children who are reading early readers and picture books will be able to read more than older kids who are reading chapter books—you want a challenge, not a cakewalk, but don't make it impossible either! Four chapter books in a month or 10 picture books or early readers is a good place to ...
Turn a reading competition into a way to raise funds for your classroom or school. Give students a reading goal sheet and ask them to collect donations from family, friends and neighbors. Adults can pledge a certain monetary amount per book read or a flat fee for the whole competition. Then as students read they can record their progress on a ...
17. Have fun while boosting word skills. Help your readers read more fluently and accurately with these easy to prep, multi-sensory, and fun sight word activities. Start a sight word band, build a rock word wall or feed the word monster. 18. Teach close reading to help students to get more out of books.
1. Register to start participating in the competition using the REGISTER button for your reading Level. (Ages 5 through 12: LEVEL 1 / Ages 13 though 18: LEVEL 2) REGISTER ONLY ONCE 2. To report on other books read throughout the competition, use the LOGIN menu (located in the header) to access your level's LOGIN PLATFORMS and REPORTING PAGES.
Here are 42 creative book report ideas designed to make reading more meaningful for kids. MiddleWeb. 1. Concrete Found Poem. This clever activity is basically a shape poem made up of words, phrases, and whole sentences found in the books students read.
More than 1,500 fourth and fifth graders in the New Haven public schools agree! They read nearly 5,000 books this year as participants in the city's annual Book Bowl, a contest that tests students' knowledge of ten selected books. They kids compete against other students at the same grade levels.
The book challenge rests on the foundation of a classroom reading community built on research-based practices for engaging children with reading. Assigning a 40-Book Challenge as a way to generate grades or push children into reading in order to compete with their classmates, corrupts everything I have written and said about reading.
READBowl is the FREE global reading competition where PreK-12th grade aged teams around the globe compete to read for the most minutes. The competition begins the week before the American College Football National Championship (2nd Monday in January) and culminates with a live crowning of the World Champions of Reading on the morning of the National Football League's (NFL) Super Bowl Sunday.
Creating a reading contest is a perfect way to motivate readers. These programs are great for year-round, holding multiple contests throughout the year, or you can hold them seasonally. You can have them compete in a multitude of ways. For schools: Grade levels. Rival Schools. Classrooms. Students in one classroom. Ages. Etc. For libraries:
The Booker Prize Reading Challenge is a self-guided reading challenge that encourages readers around the world to explore the 2024 longlist, share their thoughts, and connect with fellow Booker Prize fans. Whether you want to read just one book or the entire longlist, we'd love you to take part.
First Annual Report. January 2014-January 2015. Program Overview. Acting with vision and vigor, The Reading Is Fun Program (RIF) has made enormous strides toward its goal of becoming a permanent, integral part of the civic life of Schenectady and the learning life of Schenectady children. Currently, 70 Schenectady families are signed up to ...