OKC Students Celebrate Reading Improvements With Beach Bash

The beach comes to one Oklahoma City school as the staff at Lee Elementary celebrated students, who put in the extra effort to improve their reading skills.

More than 350 students hit the one-million word challenge this year by reading dozens of books.

"We read 25 books or a million words and our prize was we got to party out here," said Luis Cervantes, 5th grader.

Reading the book is a start, but the idea is to push the students' learning skills. The challenge was designed to get kids reading more often with the age-old theory that practice makes perfect.

"At first I would read through some books and say I need to figure out this word, which Miss Hurst helped me out" said Valentine Portillos, 5th grader. "Now that I know those words, I can go, hey, I know it."

The group of 5th graders are getting ready to move onto middle school, but they want the younger kids at Lee to keep reading and to keep improving even if it seems hard.

The staff at Lee Elementary says kids who read a million words saw improvements on the test score benchmarks throughout the year.