Wanna Motivate Your Students & Donate Books? It's Possible

First off I must say that when these kinds of things come around I assume it is too good to be true or that it is too much work. Also that if it wasn't for my co-teacher I would have never tried it.

We do Book-It at my school. The program where students read for a goal typically 400 minutes a month and if they reach it they get a free personal pan pizza. Lately that has not been the best motivator for some students, so we started using Paws for Reading (another program Scholastic runs). Let me tell you it has changed everything!

Our class logged over 13,000 minutes of reading for the month of October. We had majority of our class reach their goal of 400 minutes all thanks to Paws. Simply by splitting our class into dogs and cats (evenly) and put a teacher on each team. The minutes started rolling in!! Students are excited to turn in minutes and ask each other "Well how much did you read last night?"

It is major competition!! Even I have make an effort to plan reading time into my day because I don't want to let my cats down. The bonuses for students is they can earn printables for the minutes they read and a book is donated for every 20 minutes read. Parents can easily go and log their child's minutes so it is not a time consumer for you.

In our room we have had Dogs winning by over 1,000 minutes and then the minutes swung completely the other way so Cats are winning by 1,000. It helps that it has been staying competitive.

It runs until December if you want to join! I encourage becoming a cat! :)