In late 2010, Alex Rayner from Lord Lawson of Beamish school in the UK contacted me with the general idea of setting up a collaboration between his school and one in Australia.  By absolute chance that very day the Australian cricket team was announced for the upcoming Ashes series between England and Australia.

So I got to thinking, here we have an English school wanting to collaborate with an Australian school, the Ashes are about to be played in the upcoming Australian summer…  So the AR Ashes were born!

The next step was to find an Australian school that wanted to play in the AR Ashes.  Seeing this was the very first time we had constructed such a competition I needed to keep the competition pretty small and decided to invite only a few schools to play so that it didn’t become too big!

I sent off a few invites hoping that I might find one school to play.  Well, every school that I contacted decided that it was a great idea and we ended up with 6 schools playing in the AR Ashes.

The competition was very simple:

• Each school created as many teams of students they liked – some used classes some used smaller groupings
• Each student completed a STAR Reading test to determine their current Reading Age
• Each student was assigned an AR Points Target based on 20 minutes of daily reading over 6 weeks from the standard AR Points Target Chart
• All the individual AR Points Targets were added together to form a team s
• The AR Points each team accumulated were then used to calculate a percentage of target
• The team with the highest percentage of target was the winner

We awarded prizes for the following categories:

• All members of the winning team received a $15 iTunes voucher
• The individual student with the highest personal percentage of target received a $100 iTunes voucher

You can view all the details here – www.ARReadingChallenge.com.au

Here is some feedback from the schools that played:

“Gave our normal program a different focus and added interest and motivation”

“The classes involved were highly motivated and excited about reading which was great to see”

“Our students were very disappointed when the competition ended.”

I have a plan to run an Australia and New Zealand competition in Term 3 this year.  If you want to play or more details complete the form below:

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This little guy is meant to help you explain Accelerated Reader to your students.

You see Cosmo was a little worried about selecting a book in the library, but realised that he had just completed his STAR Reading test.  So he selected a book within his reading range and ended up getting fantastic results on his latest AR Quiz.

The bookmark and the poster are basically the same, just different size of course.

The bookmark is 250mm x 55mm, whilst the post is A2 size.  Both are full colour and a nice glossy finish.

This is the bookmark

Click through to complete the order form

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