Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 22, 1993 TAG: 9303220061
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PRINCIPALS WERE BOOKED FOR FUN
Educators are going to extraordinary lengths these days to encourage their pupils in the early grades to read.Hillsville Elementary School Principal Joe H. Bunn took three pies in the face to help push reading at his school.
"It's not as easy as it used to be to motivate them," Bunn observed. He said young people now have competition for their reading time from television, computer games and other sources.
Ann Laing, the librarian at Spiller Primary School, came up with some dandy motivation. She talked her principal, Robert Ayers, into kissing a pig if pupils in the third and fourth grades read 3,000 books by February.
By then, about 650 youngsters had read 4,555 books. And Akers came through with his end of the deal last week, planting a kiss on the brow of a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig provided by Donna Metzger before two separate assemblies of young readers.
Folks in Carroll County came up with a new reading program and then found ways to motivate participants.
Sally Chitwood, who teaches in Alleghany County, N.C., but lives in Carroll County, passed along information on a program at her school. Her husband, Eddie, teaches at Carroll County High School, and their daughter, Lauren, attends Hillsville Elementary.
Debbie Boyd, the school system's gifted-and-talented-student coordinator, and two Hillsville Elementary representatives - teacher Diane Dalton and librarian Brenda Collins - visited Piney Creek Elementary in North Carolina. What they found was a program of computerized tests for books read, with points awarded based on vocabulary, difficulty and content.
"We didn't push it on any schools. We just offered it," Boyd said. Based on its success at Hillsville Elementary, she said, interest is now being shown at Woodlawn, Gladesboro, Laurel Fork, Gladeville and Hillsville Intermediate.
Since Nov. 15, Hillsville Elementary pupils in grades two to four have read more than 1,770 books and passed the computer tests on 1,320 of them.
The program has cost about $3,600 - 26 percent for the computer tests and the rest for new books. The money came from gifted-and-talented, library, Parent Teacher Committee and general school funds.
Participants do not get graded, but they do get rewarded.
Rewards have included Dairy Queen coupons, T-shirts, small cash awards and free gym time. But the big reward came last week when three names were drawn from among the 205 pupils who had accumulated 2,000 reader points to see which ones would get to push cream pies into Bunn's face.
Dana Akers, Dalva Doss and Kristofer Merrion were the lucky ones. In May, all those who have earned 2,000 more points will get to throw wet sponges into their principal's face.
The rewards are working. Pupils have even been carrying their books to lunch and physical education classes, and reading them while waiting for buses. Youngsters who used to be reluctant readers have found that reading can be fun, in a number of ways.