Dear friends,
Welcome to Ms. McNeil’s 5th annual Real World Reading Rockstar Challenge! If this is your first time joining the challenge, we are so excited to have you on board; if you are a returning Rockstar, we’re glad to have you back (you know the drill, so you can just read the highlights)!
I am writing to you again from KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood where I teach ninety fantastic 6th graders. As a reading teacher, I want to show my students that reading can open up a million doors in the world if they are truly exploring; that reading is not a book report, a homework assignment, the antithesis to summer vacation, or just a “school thing,” but a life skill. We need the leaders of tomorrow (who sit in classrooms today) to believe with conviction that there is incredible value in reading…in picking up a newspaper to know the world view, in exploring a good book about anything from “space” to “finding your inner happiness,” in reading a poem or novel by their favorite writer,