[LM_NET] HIT: 1,000,000 word challange

[Meg Torrens <megtorrens@YAHOO.COM>]

I am trying to design a book promotion that would have students in 


grade 3-5 read one million words in a school year.  I am trying to 


figure out how to calculate the number of words. There will be a 


log to fill out that would ask for the title, author and 


favorite part of the book, but I am stuck as to how to calculate 


the number of words.  I would like to avoid tying the promotion to AR.  Any 
suggestions?  Thanks.


 

Here are the responses I received…thanks to all

 

 

How about asking the students to count the number of words? To keep it

relatively consistent, have the students use page 4 or 5, for

example--which ever seems to be more representative of the rest of the

book.  Have the kids then compute the approximate number of words in 

the books they read by multiplying the number of words on page 4 or 5 by the number 
of pages for each book. Include that information in the 

students' logs. Check the logs for numbers often to get an idea of when you are 
approaching 1,000,000. Or, the kids could enter their numbers into a log you keep 
for that purpose.

 

 

Even though you don't want to tie the promotion to AR, that would be the easiest 
way to calculate the words as AR does do that...Even if you don't have the quiz for 
your school if there is a quiz available you can get the word count from the Ren 
Learn web site...just look up the book in the store and then click on the 
title...word count is there.

 

 

I don't have the answer to how to determine the number of words. Seems 

to me that it would be extremely hard to so. How about going with the number of 
pages read instead. You might ask your math teacher what the answer would be. Or 
you might just take an average # of words per page as a guideline. Don't forget 
that fonts sizes vary as well thus making the number somewhat amorphous. Good luck 
with finding the answer.

 

 

 

You can check out my website.  We count a million words here in CA, and this is the 
Reading Calendar that I made up.  http://www.alsd.k12.ca.us/aljh/languagearts/  
Click on the Link Reading Calendars.  We have AR at our school, but it is not 
specifically connected to Reading Calendars.  Kids cannot take an AR test unless 
the reading is recorded on their Reading Calendar.  

 

What a cool promotion.  It sounds like lots of fun.  I agree with you 

about tying things to AR.  However, the website does offer the number of words for 
most books and if a student had a parent or teacher sign off on a book, you could, 
with a couple of clicks, check the number of 

words.   You could also show students how to do this and have them check their own. 
  I would love to see a hit of what people offer as solutions to your problem.  

 

One way might be to use e-Books, since its easy to get a word count for them -- but 
this deprives children of the joy of reading real books.
Another way could be to count the words on a number of sample pages in a book (say 
5 or 7), average them and then multiply by the number of pages with print in the 
book. Perhaps you could get parents to help out with this.  Better yet, have this 
counting and multiplying activity handled in math class! It a great way to teach 
kids estimation and measures of central tendancy.  They could even graph their 
progress using Excel! You could have daily updates and different kinds of graphs 
documenting number of words read by class, by grade, by girls, by boys, and numbers 
of types of books (biographies, novels, non-fiction, etc.) 
Might also be good to keep the word counts for books handy so they don't have to be 
counted again when you do this activity. Sounds like a great idea.
A mythical average page in a book might have 500 words, so a 100 page book has 
5,000 words. 200 books would amount to 1,000,000 words. That doesn't sound too hard 
for 3 grades full of kids. Great idea! Even at 250 words per page, that comes to 
400 books. Still definitely achieveable.
.

 

We did a Million Page Reading Challenge..

We had forms that went home with students and parents helped fill them 

out.Teachers kept track of reading in their classroom, so if there was a read 
aloud, each student was given that many pages of reading.

We read 1.2 million pages in a relatively short time.

A year is a long time to run a challenge and keep it interesting, so  

our principal recommended we end it on Read Across America Day.. We started when 
Dan Gutman (who has written a lot of MILLION books - including the Weird 

School Series -- Miss Daisy is Crazy, where we got the idea for the 

million page challenge!) came to our school in November, then ended on March 2nd. 
There were two vacations in between.The hardest part is keeping the stats. We had 
parents help, and the teachers 

had to be on board for this to work, as every teacher kept track of 

reading during the week. You can see a little more on our website:

http://gfs.westport.k12.ct.us/gfs/homepage.htm

The last item in the menu is the Million Page Reading Challenge


                
---------------------------------
 Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page 

--------------------------------------------------------------------
All LM_NET postings are protected by copyright law.
To change your LM_NET status, e-mail to: listserv@listserv.syr.edu
In the message write EITHER: 1) SIGNOFF LM_NET  2) SET LM_NET NOMAIL
3) SET LM_NET MAIL  4) SET LM_NET DIGEST  * Allow for confirmation.
LM_NET Help & Information: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/
Archive: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/archive/
EL-Announce with LM_NET Select: http://elann.biglist.com/sub/
LM_NET Supporters: http://www.eduref.org/lm_net/ven.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------