Introduction
Everyone knows that reading is good for you. The problem is that in today's society there are so many other things that the book has to compete with. Students spend a lot of time in front of computers and they love to communicate and publish things on the net. At Gunnesboskolan in Lund we try to combine the two, books and computers, in creating a blog where the student write short book reviews. The task is created as a challenge; if the students manage to read 600 kilometres (in Swedish = 60 mil, a Swedish mil is 10 km), by the 23rd of April, the World Book Day, they will be awarded. If they fail they will have to dust all the shelves in the library. To reach our goal each of our 240 student in year 6-9 has to read about five books. An ordinary youth book is about 500 meters long.
Background
The librarian at our school has noticed that the amount of books read in the different classes differs a lot. In some classes they read everything she has and in others only a few com-pulsory books. The school arranges an annual book expo as a way of stimulating reading, but she felt we needed to do something more that lasts over a longer period. At a lecture we heard the brain professor Martin Ingvar talk about the importance of reading and he said that you have to read about 6 kilometres before you dechifer the different sounds as whole words. The more you read the more words you read at one glance.
The idea
This information matured during summer and at the start of this term we started a challenge. Our 240 students should try to read 600 kilometers, the distance to our capital Stockholm, by the 23rd of April, the World Book Day. If they succeed they will be awarded; the price will be discussed in the student council, if they fail they have to clean the shelves and sort books in the library.
The blog
We decided to organize the challenge in a blog, where the students publish their book reviews and present the result of their calculations of how long their books are. (Lenght of each line x number of lines on a page x number of pages, minus 15% since not all pages are full.)
We have a main page: http://lasutmaning.blogspot.com, but on this page we have to have one "subblog" for each grade since you only can have 100 users on each blog. The librarian is the one who summarizes how far we have read. All teachers and other students are requested to read and write comments. We have an extra individual competiton, who reads the furthest in each grade. The winners will be awarded with books. The librarian keeps track of how far each student has read.
Result
We've only had this blog for a short time but we can already say that it is a succees. All students are aware of their importance if we are to achieve our goal. They are also fond of publishing their book reviews on the blog. Sometimes their language is a little influenced by their chat language but then we teachers inform them that when the reader isn't present and isn't able to ask questions if someting is unclear, then they have to use a "fullworthy" language so that the readers can understand everything .A big advantage is the focus this blog brings on reading. People talk about the blog and reading, since both students and teachers read and comment the book reviews.
