What’s Right With Our Schools: Prep Public Royal Readers
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) – If a picture is worth a thousand words, then, a million words should get you a trip to Dave and Busters. The Royal Readers program at Prep Public is proving to be a real page turner.
Juan Anaguinaga is the Chief Academic Officer at Prep Public Schools.
He explains,” The name of the program is Royal Readers. It’s a 6th thru 8th grade program, and it’s really pushed in middle school because that’s where we see a lot of literacy gaps. So, in our middle school, we really want to ensure that students fall in love with literacy and dive deep into these books that they’re interested in to really just love reading. We developed the Royal Readers program about two years ago as a way to help students increase our vocabulary, comprehension skills, and ACT scores and NTN ready scores. The best way to do this was to turn reading into a competition here at Prep Public Schools.”
Abraham Hernandez is an 8th grader.
He says, ” Right now, I’m up to 1.1 million words. When I participated, I started becoming a reader, like, more interested in books, because before, I wasn’t a reader, I didn’t like reading. I hated it, but then when I heard you get rewarded for reading, I was like, I have to start reading.
8th grader EMonte Thornton says, “I’ve read up to 2 million words. I’ve always liked reading. It’s just been, like, an easy thing for me to do since I was really young. Normally, like ever since the Royal Reader program has started, I’ve started reading longer books because before, I normally read graphic novels and easier books, but they’re faster to read.”
Mr. Anaguinaga concludes,” We give the Royal Readers jackets. When they hit 1 million words, they’ll get their jackets so that they can walk out with their jackets, and everyone can see the accomplishment that these students are Royal Readers, and once they read 1 million words, they get to go to an end of the year trip to Dave and Busters, where they’ll hear from a local author. In this case, this year, it’s going to be Greg Fundenberg, who’s written an amazing book. They get to play games. They get to eat pizza. I hope that they go into high school, continue to read books, but really use the skills that they have learned from reading a lot of books in their AP classes, that at the end of the day in their junior year, that these skills translate to the ACT exam as well in that reading portion. We really want students to be successful on the ACT, and creating a love of reading in middle school is a great start for that.”
