Recognition of Battle of the Books Team, May 2005 Winner - Westchase Elementary School

Battle of the Books is a district-wide reading enrichment program for fourth graders. The program began a 11 years ago with 6 schools participating and has grown to 113 schools. Members of the 2004-2005 Battle of the Books winning team, from Westchase Elementary School, are being recognized. This program has been proven to be an exciting and fun way to foster good reading habits.

The purpose of the Battle of the Books program is to encourage recreational reading, to offer a variety of types of literature, to increase familiarity with different authors, and to share books through written and oral expression. Research has found that students who participate in free voluntary or recreational reading did as well or better in reading comprehension tests than students whose only source of reading was classroom basal reading instruction. It has been proven that reading as a leisure activity is the best predictor of comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed.

In March, the fourth graders are given a written test to select each class Battle of the Books Team. The test is to determine which students are the most familiar with all the stories from the books on the list. All participating schools have their local battle following the testing. The winning school team moves on to participate in the Area Battle and the District Battle follows.

Goal 1 - The percentage of students scoring at Level 3 or higher on FCAT reading will increase a minimum of 5 percentage points.

There is no additional cost to the district.