SVES students read over 44,000 books last year

Students at San Vicente Elementary School read 44,881 books last year, adding up to over 232 million words read! What’s more, the students passed comprehension quizzes on each and every one of the books read!

One student, Kiana Reyes, read 4,225,115 words by herself. An outstanding class from last year was Ms. Bobbie Aguon’s, which read 3,827 books. That’s an average of over 200 books per student. Ms. Rose Reyes’ class was the word count champ, with her class alone reading over 20 million words last year. How many words did you read last year?

The students are taking part in a program called Accelerated Reader. Students borrow books at their reading level, read them, and then take a computerized quiz that checks for understanding of the book. The program keeps track of how many quizzes each student takes and passes. The Canaries hope to break the 50,000 mark by the end of this school year.

This program is helping SVES students reach their goal of having all students read on level, according to the school’s librarian, Rick Gramlich.

“The students really enjoy AR, as we call it. They or their teachers can set goals, read books at their reading level, and watch their point totals and reading levels grow. This program is actually helping our students perform better in all subjects. When they are reading interesting books that they have chosen, they will read faster to find out what happens. This leads to faster decoding of the words. Decoding faster helps them in other subjects because they won’t have to slowly trudge through the textbooks. Another great thing about this program is that it gives quantified data for students, classes, and the whole school. Some schools have ‘read-a-thons’ that count the books or pages read according to what the student or parents say were read. Our Canaries have to pass standardized quizzes that check for comprehension of the whole book,” said Gramlich.

SVES has been lucky to have administrators who value the library and appropriate $10,000 to $15,000 in federal grant money each year to order around 1,000 new books. The library has more books than any other elementary library in the CNMI.

Gramlich sums it up thus: “At SVES we understand that we need the newest, hottest titles to compete with TV, video games, and the Internet. Reading is the foundation for most learning, so the investment is worth it. Our students have already read 2,500 books in three weeks. In fact, they have read almost 15 million words already this year. How many have you read?” (PR)