For the second consecutive year, Port Maitland Consolidated School is the Yarmouth County champion of the WOW Reading Challenge for elementary schools. The school also placed third in the world in the Fiddlers Division (under 250 students).
“It’s a win-win for everyone,” says Deborah Duke, the librarian for the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Library and coordinator of the program locally. “The kids read and receive prizes and they learn to love literature. The reading in and of itself is a great reward.”
The literacy initiative, in its fifth year in the region, continues to grow as Carleton Consolidated School joined this year, bringing the number of participating schools in the area to six. Students from Arcadia Consolidated School, Carleton, Yarmouth Central School, Meadowfields Community School, Port Maitland and South Centennial Elementary School read 152,677 books between November and April, averaging 122 books per students.
“We had a nine per cent increase in the number of books read per student over the previous year,” Duke says.Meadowfields school placed second in the Tartan Division (250 students or more) in the world and South Centennial won the Special Recognition for Literacy award.There was a special ceremony at Port Maitland school on Tuesday, May 24 with presentations by RCMP Const. John Kennedy, Jennifer Campbell of Register.com/Web.com and Rick Churchill, councillor for the Municipality of the District of Yarmouth. The WOW Reading Challenge is a partnership between the RCMP, Western Counties Regional Library and elementary schools to promote literacy by encouraging children to read.
