My school has come a very long way with our implementation of Accelerated Reader in the past year. I’m still not completely sure how I feel about the program — how it aligns with my philosophy of reading and all — but I’ve committed to helping my school implement it with fidelity. I attended the AR Symposium last November and learned a lot about how the program is designed to be implemented. I came back and we started taking steps to start pushing our program in the right direction. We started having school-wide silent reading time each day. Last year, the focus was put on having students earn 100% on quizzes. I gave incremental prizes for earning so many 100%s on quizzes (and just about lost my mind trying to keep up with that.

I went back to the drawing board this summer and thought about everything I’ve learned about AR. I decided that it was time for us to move toward goal setting. This would fall to the teachers, which I HATE to do, but it really is the way Renaissance Place wants you to do it. I just don’t like feeling like I’m piling more work on the teachers. So I laid out the plan and walked the teachers through goal setting. For this first nine weeks we set fairly modest goals because I wanted it to be achievable. Each student’s goal is based on their STAR results and they kept track of their progress in their AR folders.

The nine weeks ended the week before last and the kids were ready to CELEBRATE! I told them that if they met their nine weeks goal, they would be invited to a celebration. At the intermediate and middle schools, they use AR goals to give a reading grade. We didn’t want to go that route, so we decided a celebration would work best for our 2nd and 3rd graders. We had our celebration this afternoon — a coke float party. About half of the students at our school met their goal this time around, which is pretty good, I think! I think that even though we are bumping up our goals this nine weeks, we will still see progress.