with their internal measures, their phonics assessments and their instructional reading level assessments.”
The Million-Word Club Read On, Sonoma celebrated million-word readers at the end of the school term. “We had 126 students read over a million words this year,” Leisen says. “And 30 of them were multi- million-word readers, which blows my mind.” Leisen describes a very successful end-of-year awards assembly with a touching surprise from the students. “We were at Riebli Elementary, where 95% of the students met their reading goal during the last trimester, which was just phenomenal,” she says. “We’ve got our team there, we’ve got our Chromebooks up there and we’re celebrating our million-word readers.” “There’s a kiddo named Conner who read 5,264,663 words,” Leisen says. “We announced his name and his name was up on the projector screen and impromptu, the entire student body started chanting Conner, Conner!” “One of the things we say is we want to celebrate reading like the game-winning touchdown and, I’m getting goosebumps when I say this, because it organically happened like that,” Leisen says. “He came just prancing down the aisle to get his letter while his name was being chanted by the entire student body as the champion of reading,” Leisen says. “That’s the why of it, really—that’s why I love this work.” Conner Melligan, 11, was in Andrea Farrell’s fifth-grade
class at Riebli Elementary this past year and she says the impromptu chanting of his name at the awards assembly was a motivating experience for his peers as well. “He’s an avid reader and this year he had already hit the million-word mark by the first trimester,” Farrell says. “Seeing the whole school cheer for him and the smile he had on his face, it was just amazing. And then that was also super motivating to the rest of the class—they wanted to be up there with Conner and get in that million-word club.” Farrell points out that one of the biggest gaps they’ve noticed from the pandemic is in reading and writing. “They Conner Melligan read more than 5 million words as part of the program at Riebli Elementary School in Santa Rosa.
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August 2024
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