Photo by Florence Hallford
Pictured, left to right, are Lovington Grade School librarian Karen Smith-Cox, Joshua Zander holding his prize, fifth grade first-runner up Alyssa Thompson, and fourth grade, third place Emma Edwards.

School reads more than 67 million words during contest

June 3, 2015

by Florence Hallford
& Keith Stewart
keith@newsprogress.com

As Amazon’s great text stats have calculated, the average length of a book is around 64,000 words. But for Lovington seventh grader Joshua Zander, that’s hardly a big deal.
And he would know.
Zander recently won a reading contest at the grade school after totaling 5,148,507 words read throughout the school year.
That came to 75 books, but even that was an easy feat after learning what the prize was.
“Once Josh found out the “Call of Duty” was involved, it was easy for him to take the tests in AR to document his accomplishments,” said Karen Smith-Cox, the grade school’s librarian for the past 12 years. “I noticed Josh was a reader last year when discussing books with him. I was impressed with his reading level and types of books. I would order through Illinois Heartland Library System books we did not have in our library for him. He also goes to the public library a lot to order even more books.”
Word count was verified through a test system called AR (accelerated reading). The student would enter the book he or she read and the AR system would test them on the book to assure they read it.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.