I teach at Brownwood Intermediate School, an eleven year-old state recognized school, that is made up of about 500 fifth and sixth grade students in Brownwood, Texas. We have a success story of our own that we feel is pretty unique using Scholastic Reading Counts!

We keep a bulletin board in our hallway of successful readers. A large majority of students get their name put on the board during the school year. The bulletin board is arranged in three different ways by points: individual point clubs (75, 150, 250, 500 and 1000), homeroom performance and by team performance. A team is made up of four homerooms. All the students compete to see who can get the most points for themselves, their homerooms and for their teams. It is competitive and students get recognition based on their efforts in reading. They can even win prizes throughout the year and at the end of the year.

All the teachers at our school are using Scholastic Reading Counts! in their classes. Many of them, even the elective teachers, make students’ Scholastic Reading Counts! performance a part of their grades. Each teacher finds their own unique way to incorporate this program into the curriculum. It is so easy because we all have access to Scholastic Reading Counts! student performance records. We can see if a student has been reading and testing, what they have been reading and testing on and how they are doing on their quizzes. In the last few years we have been really pushing this program and our scores have improved not only in reading but in math, science and social studies! Even the parents have noticed this. We have parents that request reading progress reports and request more books for their children to read.

We also decided to come up with a fun, positive contest that would encourage reading and the use of Scholastic Reading Counts! quizzes. Our school created a contest that we called "The Super Bowl of Reading," which coordinated with the NFL playoffs. We arranged all the homerooms in a tournament grouping, which were displayed on library windows. We even had the students decorate the windows with a football theme. Every week the homerooms that had the highest Scholastic Reading Counts! points for the week advanced to the next level. It was a double elimination contest, in which, you could win a "wild card" spot in the last bracket if you didn’t ‘fumble’ more than once. This was designed to encourage all homerooms as long as possible. We didn’t want a homeroom to not try if they had a bad week. It was very easy for the students because all of the teams have a list of Scholastic Reading Counts! quizzes and our Scholastic Reading Counts! books are marked in our library. Students were able to use these lists to choose appropriate books on their levels. Hesitant students even started reading books at a higher level just to acquire more points for their homerooms. Students got so into the contest toward the end, especially the last week, when it was the top fifth grade class against the top sixth for the Super Bowl title. Students were trying to get out of lunch to go to the library to read and test ! At the end of the five weeks our school had gained a total of 15,296 Scholastic Reading Counts! points. Our students worked hard and deserve recognition for their efforts.

We plan to make this an annual event because of its great success. Next year the students will be even more excited; having gone through this before, our sixth graders will challenge our fifth graders to an even higher degree not only in "The Super Bowl of Reading," but through other contests and through daily reading using Scholastic Reading Counts!!! I would strongly encourage any school to follow our lead. Even our most hesitant readers were determined to win. It was a team effort for all the classrooms.

Thank you,

Tiffany Baker
Brownwood Intermediate School
Brownwood, Texas