BY: JACOB H

The first month of the Bookmans' Reading Challenge is over! The books have been read, the numbers tallied, and Tucson and Mesa students are set to blow last year's three month total out of the water.

Is it wrong to toot your own horn? I mean, really? Because I totally feel the need to tell you how awesome Bookmans is right now. Well, Bookmans and 20,000 elementary school students in Arizona. Confused? Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

On February 1st we kicked off the 2nd annual Bookmans’ Reading Challenge. We're asking students from 36 elementary schools in Tucson and Mesa to read as many books as they can over a three month period. We will be awarding the school with the highest average of books read per student with $5,000 in each city, for a grand total of $10,000 donated towards schools in our community.

Last week, we tallied the results from February and they were nothing less than astonishing: over 85,000 books read! 85,000!

I work for a bookstore, so it might not surprise you that I was a lot better at my lit classes than my math classes in school. But even I understand that 85,000 is a whole heapin’ lot of books! In this day and age I might even go so far as to call that number pretty miraculous.   

When do we ever hear about kids reading in this technological age? Kids playing video games? Check. Kids spending hours IMing with their friends on the computer? Check. But picking up a book and reading words on a page - do kids still do that? 85,000 books say yes, yes, yes! And that’s good news for all of us. Study after study has proven that children with poor literacy skills are more likely to have lower self esteem, get into more trouble at school and at home, and those problems only become worse as those kids approach adulthood. 

But why is Bookmans doing this, you might be asking yourself? We’re talking about $10,000, after all. Certainly we could use that money for TV commercials or print ads. The simple answer is that we believe in the importance of reading. We believe that teachers and librarians are amazing people who perform amazingly important jobs. And we feel like we have an obligation to help out in our community in any way that we can. I feel so proud to work for a company who holds those beliefs at its core. 

So, at the end of the first month of the Bookmans’ Reading Challenge, here’s to the students, teachers, and librarians who worked so hard during the month of February! I would like to specifically recognize a couple of schools and classes who have gone above and beyond:

• Rio Vista Elementary School in Tucson read over 16,000 books in February, for an average of 28 books read per student. 
  
• Ms. Hamilton’s Kindergarten class from Rio Vista read an average of 80 books per student, and that wins them a field trip to Bookmans!
• In Mesa, Highland Elementary School read over 6,000 books for an average of 10 books read per student.
• Ms. Coomb's Kindergarten class from Webster Elementary school in Mesa averaged an unbelievable 61 books read per student, winning them a field trip to Bookmans. Great job! 

From Stephanie Quimby-Greene in the Rio Vista library:

To the wonderful folks at Bookmans,

We are thrilled to be in the lead.  We read your entire email on the intercom when we received it, and teachers said their classes cheered! Everyone is very excited about Mrs. Hamilton’s field trip. Everyone is sharing the pride that our kinders are going on a field trip - 5th graders stopped by the library afterschool to talk about how their younger brother or sister was in Mrs. Hamilton’s class. They were proud to report that they’d read to a kindergarten sibling, or made sure that they had encouraged their younger sibling to fill out the Bookmans form! 

One of the many activities our literacy committee coordinated for the contest was assigning kinders, first graders and second graders a “buddy” class. Older students would go to the kinder rooms and each kindergartener would have an older "buddy" to read to and to help them with words to hard to sound out. The buddy class that had gotten to know the kindergarteners in Mrs. Hamilton’s class were so excited for them! They’ve already left me notes, or told me in person, how they knew students in Mrs. Hamilton’s class. It’s exciting to see 4th and 5th graders take an almost parental pride about a student that had read a book to them!

On behalf of Rio Vista,  thank you for Mrs. Hamilton’s field trip and the pride our school shares in being in the lead for the first month of the contest.

From Shawna Bonnin, Webster Elementary fourth grade teacher:

I am writing to thank you for challenging my students to read. I currently teach fourth grade at Webster Elementary and we are participating in Bookmans' Reading Challenge. It has amazed me, that with the simple idea of a reading challenge to see how many books we can read, the amount of enthusiasm that my students have at this moment to read. Everyday they are asking me "can I go to the library?" Or "can I read now?" My small classroom library has to be rearranged and organized daily because students are looking for books they did not read earlier in the year.