United for literacy: How an entire community supports student reading success

The Challenge

For fifth-grade ELA teacher Chad Peterman, making sure his students are strong readers is always a priority. When he joined the staff at Indian Valley, he noticed the lack of passion and desire for reading in students. He knew something was missing—that something had to change to get his students motivated to read. Using his knowledge of Accelerated Reader (AR) from his previous teaching experience, he brought AR to the students at Indian Valley.

The Solution

Measuring students against current state assessment scores versus what he knew they were capable of doing was how Peterman set his standard. He knew that if students could achieve 2.8 AR points a week through their independent reading, they would hit 100 points by the end of the school year.

How would he inspire students to achieve this?

His soon-to-be passion project of an “Accelerated Reader Auction” started small. The recognition started with an extra recess or movie every nine weeks, and any student who achieved the targeted reading goal for the period was invited to participate. He then created the idea of an AR Auction, where students could bid on prizes based on their accumulated AR points at the end of the school year.

Implementation

Now in its seventh year, the AR Auction is beloved by the entire Indian Valley community, with staff, parents, and community members donating and even shopping together on Black Friday to get the best value to support the students and the auction. In recent years, the community has gathered an astonishing $25,000 in prizes for the auction.

It’s not just an auction, however. It’s so much more.

It’s a constant motivator for students: motivation to keep reading, exploring new books, and taking the AR quizzes to demonstrate their comprehension. Whether it’s the latest Percy Jackson title or books about rocks and outer space, the students are clearly responding. Peterman takes the opportunity of the auction to have students prepare personal statements, which they are then responsible for presenting to him and their peers on the rationale behind their choice of auction prizes to be available.

Impact

Eighty one percent of students in the school scored proficient or above on their Ohio State Test the year that Peterman launched the AR Auction. As he likes to point out, “It’s wonderful when students see the positive outcomes of their work.”

Tying in AR to the Science of Reading, Peterman continues, “There are five main components in the science of reading- phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The most measurable of in Indian Valley’s AR practices are vocabulary development and reading comprehension. Students who meet or exceed their AR reading goals are more likely to grow their vocabulary as well as increase their ability to comprehend what they read.”

Peterman says the heightened reading motivation is starting to spill into science and social studies as well, with students connecting their AR quizzes to subjects they find interesting. The students themselves are also starting to see the impact.