East School students compete in Reading Olympics

As top athletes around the globe gathered in Vancouver for the 2010 winter Olympics, East Elementary School students cozied up with books for a combined total of 389,563 minutes in their own Olympics-inspired games.

For four weeks in February, East School's reading and literacy specialists Karen Abramson, Pam Cullinan and Jen Valiante challenged students to participate in a Reading Olympics. They called on kindergarten, first grade and second grade students to read for 20 minutes each day and increased the goal time to 30 minutes for third and fourth grade students.

"The students in each class also created and named a country and made a flag," Cullinan said. "The country names tend to use the homeroom teachers names. `Capitaly' is named after Mrs. Cappelli and Italy."

Third grader Jessica Boolukas ranked first in the school with 6,630 minutes of reading.

Students who reached 90 percent of the goal reading time earned gold medals. Students who fulfilled 80 percent of the goal reading time earned silver medals and those who read for 70 percent of the goal time earned bronze medals.

The classroom in each grade with the highest combined total of minutes also earned recognition.

"Everyone did a lot of reading over the last four weeks," said Principal Alexandra Potts at the reading Olympics closing ceremony last Friday afternoon. "It was a healthy competition because there are five or six sections in each grade and the students competed individually, too."

The Reading Olympics closed with a ceremonious donation of $2,000 to the Red Cross for Haiti crisis relief aid. East School students raised and donated the money in the weeks since a magnitude 7 earthquake rocked the country's largest port city to rubble in January.