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Dear Schmitz Park Families,
This year Schmitz Park School and Seattle Public Schools is introducing a new program to encourage students to read.
The Read a Million Words, Seattle! campaign is a challenge to our students to read a million words per year. The goal of the program is to help every student develop the habit of reading and to celebrate our reading.
At Schmitz Park School this campaign will bring a few changes to our routines.
For starters, we will be replacing our reading calendar with a reading log. We are asking that parents and teachers help students keep track of their reading. This will include classroom reading, times you read to or with your child and independent reading. It will include reading books as well as any other reading (websites, magazines etc.).
Of course, with any new effort we will be working out the kinks as we go along, but here are a few things we ask you to keep in mind as we engage in this effort:
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Have fun! This is an opportunity to have a little fun as we pay attention to and celebrate reading.
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Help your child. Each night we expect students to do 20-30 minutes of reading depending on their grade. At the end of their nightly reading help them enter their reading in their reading log.
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Estimate. We don’t expect an exact count of words, just an estimate. One way to help your students estimate is to estimate the number of words on one line of text, times the number of lines on a page of text, times the number of pages read. Along with the reading log will be some ways of estimating the number of words read.
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Watch for further instructions. Each grade and at times each teacher will create routines to help with this campaign.
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Set a goal. It isn’t appropriate for a kindergartener to aim for 1 million words this year. It will be tough even for a 5th grader. So set a goal with your student after you have tracked a week or two of reading. Even consider taking on the challenge yourself – to model for your child.
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Volunteer. We will be looking for volunteers to help make this campaign a fun and successful venture. If you are willing to help please let the school office know or e-mail me at
rjmellish@seattleschools.org. There will be work that can be done at home or at school.
As usual, if you have questions please don’t hesitate to ask your teacher or me. Thanks for your support.
Richard Mellish, Principal
Download Reading Logs:
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