Photo provided Southside Elementary School students celebrated their Final Four of the Read to the Final Four competition with donuts and pajama day.
Third grade students at Southside Elementary are headed to the Final Four Fan Fest in Indianapolis as a reward for making it to the Final Four of the Read to the Final Four competition.
Students in Mrs. Erica Coy’s, Mrs. Amy Garrison and Mrs. Miranda Sprinkle’s classes have been charting their minutes spent reading since early November to cruise through the competition from other Indiana schools.
Every week, the students must catalog the hours they spent reading that week to move forward in a bracket against other third graders in the state. Southside Elementary students read enough to advance through the top 64, 32, 16 and eight to make it to the top four.
Southside’s Assistant Principal Nick Hill said that he and Principal Jeff Backmeyer made the competition a big deal at the school to really motivate the students. Each of the kids made an individual reading goal for the week and those who achieved their goals celebrated with a different award at the end of each week.
Since Friday was the last day of the competition before the overall winner is revealed in April, all the third graders celebrated their reading with a breakfast party and pajama day at school. The students want to be the school with the overall most minutes read in the whole state of Indiana to win the top prize.
The top four schools won a trip to the men’s NCAA Final Four game on April 6 where they will be recognized as finalists and see who wins the championship prize. The winning school will receive brand new sneakers for all the third graders and the top 26 readers from all four schools combined will win a brand new bike.
Hill said that the Southside third graders all read at least 30 minutes daily already, but the third grade teachers saw an increase in reading outside of school. He even said that some kids even had to go to the library three times a week to get new books.
Hill also said that Coy, Garrison and Sprinkle all work really hard to find the perfect books to engage their young readers, and he speculates that the reading enthusiasm will continue even after the competition ends through the end of the school year.
