Hauppauge Forest Brook Elementary School Wins National Reading Contest

Students from Forest Brook Elementary School in Hauppauge, NY are celebrating as winners of the LightSail 25 Challenge, logging an average 1,373 minutes (nearly 23 hours) of reading per student during the past month. The grand prize is a library of premium e-books for the school, valued at $3,000.

The reading contest tracked the average minutes read per participant on the LightSail platform. Second prize was awarded to a charter school in the Bronx, NY and River Trail School in Gurnee, IL, came in third place.

“Our class embraced the LightSail 25 Challenge with its usual exuberance!” said Forest Brook Elementary School fifth grade teacher Eileen Doda. “Students checked on their progress every morning and were extremely proud to display these minutes on our chart. How awesome is it to also have the number one reader in the nation in our class? The LightSail 25 proved to build the stamina of every one of my students as a reader. I am so very proud of my students’ reading accomplishments as they worked together as a group to reach a common goal.”

Created by LightSail Education, the leading education technology dedicated to turning students everywhere into readers, the challenge was open to classrooms across the U.S. that use LightSail, uniting them with the common goal of reading as much as possible during each day of the challenge. The event ran for one month, ending February 10, 2017.

Schools that had the most minutes read overall were also acknowledged. The Jackson Avenue School in Mineola, NY logged a total 217,401 minutes read, the third most in the country.

Principal of Jackson Avenue School Janet Gonzalez said the LightSail 25 Challenge succeeded in getting students to read more. “It was amazing to see our students so motivated and excited to read during the LightSail 25 Challenge,” she said. “Students were eager to view the daily standings. Their enthusiasm to read enabled them to exceed our expectations – we increased our minutes read per student from approximately 30 to nearly 500!”

The LightSail 25 Challenge was based upon data that shows the more minutes students read, the more reading growth they achieve. LightSail analyzed the performance of more than 16,000 students to quantify the powerful impact of students reading at least 20 minutes a day on its platform. The data showed that students who read between 20-30 minutes per login grew 2.5 times typical Lexile growth, the standard classroom literacy metric. And, students who read 30 minutes or more per login had average gains three times what is considered typical.

“The LightSail 25 Challenge reinvigorated our students’ love of reading and desire to read simply for the joy of reading,” said Rockville Centre’s Riverside Elementary School teacher Keith Eckert. “The greatest impact of the challenge was that many of our previously struggling readers that saw an increase in Lexile numbers as well as a rise in reading stamina that students did not believe they were capable of.”

LightSail is the adaptive reading platform that helps students, classrooms, and school districts exceed their literacy goals.

LightSail students get access to personalized libraries filled with thousands of engaging, just-right texts to choose from. Our award-winning solution embeds in-text assessments that motivate students to increase the volume of their reading along with the difficulty of the texts they choose.

LightSail teachers get real-time access to meaningful data about student reading behavior, comprehension, and growth so they can provide the necessary guidance to enhance learning and encourage a love of reading. For more information, visit http://lightsailed.com.