They did it! Enon Elementary students read one million minutes and their principals stayed true to their word with a promise to dye their hair blue and gold, the school’s colors, during an assembly. The goal was for students to participate in a nightly reading assignment under the guidance of their mascot’s motto for reading “Gators Gobble Books,” reading 20 minutes each evening.
The students reached their one million minutes goal during the second grading period.
Principal Mike Crusco and Assistant Principal Ginny Riddick wanted to encourage the students to reach the one million mark and keep the culture of literature awareness, and they had a choice to dye their hair or being taped to the wall with duct tape. “We chose to have our hair dyed,” Crusco said. “We wanted to encourage reading and felt this was a good way to promote taking time to read . There are some awesome findings that children reading 20 minutes a day makes a huge difference for them and reading or being read to each day, [they]saw their reading age improve by nearly two years in less than five months.”
For additional encouragement the staff wore t-shirts each Monday with the imprint of “I helped gobble a million minutes,” and students received gift cards from Sheetz upon reaching goals during the grading period. The fourth grade read the most minutes.
