One Million Minutes of Reading: a How-to

This post is dedicated to my fellow teacher librarians and holds what I learned by leading the CAC Million Minutes of Reading Challenge.


Do you want to lead your school or organization in reading one million minutes? These are the steps we followed at CAC.

Step 1: Come up with the idea

At CAC, we have to credit Dr. Jailan Abbas for the idea. She first heard of the Million Minutes of Reading at a conference. She came back armed with a little paper calculator that showed how many minutes of reading per student would be needed to reach a collective million. For a school of 300 students, the calculator said it would only require each student to read 20 minutes a day for one school year. Since between the elementary school and the middle school we have about 500 students, we knew it was doable.

Step 2: Come up with the rationale

We presented the idea to the ES administrative team, and because they are the super supportive leaders they are, they gave us the go ahead to present to the teachers. The MS principal was also present at that first meeting and he said that even if the ES didn't do it, they would!

We considered that setting this collective reading goal would:

• help provide motivation to read and maintain consistent reading practice
• build community through a shared goal
• promote CAC core values of perseverance, integrity and responsibility

The CAC Core Values were rolled out this year and tying the Million Minutes of Reading Challenge to these dispositions helped reinforce the values.

Click here for the presentation to the ES faculty.  We wanted to reassure our teachers that logging minutes would not be time consuming for them. Click here for the survey form we used to poll teachers on their interest in the challenge. While a few expressed some concerns, most were happy to support the initiative and we moved ahead.

Step 3: Come up with a way to track the minutes

Once we had the approval of the admin and the faculty, it was time for the nitty gritty details of how to track our reading time.

If you read the presentation above, you saw that we had 2 options for tracking our reading time: through Reading Rewards, a paid subscription, or through an in-house Google Form. Although Reading Rewards had lots of very attractive bells and whistles, our faculty preferred using a Google Form. They considered it an easier and less time-consuming option that would focus on the reading challenge. Creating the form and manipulating the data was a learning curve for me, but I did enjoy putting it all together. 

I created a Google Form that required patrons to log in with their school username and password. This helped us keep the survey in house and also helped us identify individuals who might have entered too large amounts. The Google Form was linked to a Google Sheet with all the responses, all 2,461 of them. I created several pivot tables on separate tabs of the Google Sheet to track the percentage achieved towards our goal, the number of minutes by division (ES/MS), the number of minutes per house team, and the number of minutes by homeroom. 

Creating pivot tables was the hardest part of all of this, but with the help of data guru and CAC curriculum coordinator David Chadwell and the Google Sheets Help pages, I had handy charts of the incoming data. 

For example, here is a screenshot of the total minutes per homeroom.

And here is a screenshot of our percentage read pie chart. It charts one million minutes against the difference between one million minutes and the accumulated total. The chart self-updated with each entry.

(Actually, the above is an earlier version of the chart and I had programmed it wrong, but I include it here as an illustration because we've completed the challenge and exceeded it, one of the values for the actual chart are negative and won't display so I can't show a real time screenshot.) 

Step 4: Come up with a way to publicly keep track

We had the electronic display but we needed a way of keeping track that we could all view. The display had to be large enough to be seen from a distance, be placed in a common ES & MS area, be durable and perhaps reusable, be colorful, be reasonably priced and be easy to update.

After several design iterations, this is the design we had printed on a big vinyl chart which we placed close to the front gate of school and in full view of entering students. It cost about 50 US$ at a local print shop and included the stickers to fill in as we progressed along. We didn't ask for them, but the print shop threw in several extra stickers in each of the four colors: purple, orange, yellow, and green. Credit to the design goes to Lena Rezk, the middle high school library assistant.

The colored stickers have 25,000 printed on them as they represent 25,000 minutes read. I checked the running total often to update the chart. At one point, one whole class of sixth graders entered the wrong total and the electronic chart said we were up to 800,000 minutes. The teacher called the next morning to tell me she's given the students wrong numbers. We deleted all the MS entries from the day before and the running total went down to 600,000. By then though, I had already added the 9 extra stickers and had to peel them off. Luckily, they came off easily and still had enough sticky on them to be put back a couple of weeks later when we reached 800,000 for real.

Step 5: Come up with ways to publicize and motivate

We gave ourselves 5 months to read one million minutes. We started strong, with articles in the school newsletters, grade level blogs, the MS Daily Bulletin, the ES's CACN daily broadcast and the CAC ES Library and the CAC MHS Library's Facebook pages. Here are 2 of our spots on CACN, created with students who are part of the library lunch crowd.

I also created a how-to video for students. This was shared via CACN and with teachers.

We also had a beautiful poster and matching bookmarks, once again designed by our library assistant Lena Rezk. Adding a QR code to the poster and bookmarks was meant to facilitate logging of minutes. We had the bookmarks copied in black and white onto colored cardstock to keep costs down. 

All promotional products posted here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

We knew that we had 2 possible problems: that students would cheat and that they would lose interest. To combat both problems, we wrote up articles for the school newsletters, grade level blogs, the MHS daily notices and the ES's CACN daily broadcast, highlighting the CAC Core Value of integrity and how logging with integrity was a good way to practice that core value.

Twice in the first few weeks, we had students who entered large numbers just to see what happened. Both times the students involved, identified by their username which the form collects automatically, were contacted personally by me and shown how their experiment skewed everyone's results. We didn't have any problems on that score after that. Some MS students inflated their numbers, but we checked with their language arts teachers when the numbers were high.

Motivation did lag sometimes. There were days in which we felt we would never get there, but especially towards the end, when the display started sprouting green stickers, interest re-blossomed. Our library assistant, Lena, designed a poster and bookmarks, with QR codes to make entering numbers easy from mobile devices.

One particularly effective motivator was inviting the 12 top loggers to lunch with visiting authors. This happened towards the end of the five months and it sparked continued interest as the numbers mounted. If we hadn't had authors visiting and willing to offer themselves as the prize, we would have come up with some sort of competition to get everyone excited again.

Step 6: Come up with a way to celebrate

From the very beginning, the one question people asked was, What happens when we reach one million? To me, just reaching the goal would have been a celebration in itself, but we ended up having to offer a school-wide celebration as the reward. Luckily for the Million Minutes Committee, the ES Student Council offered to organize it. We'll be having that on March 17, after school. All ES and MS students are invited.

Here's a video celebrating reaching our goal.

Music credit:  "Our Story Begins" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

So that's my how-to. I'm sharing because I would have liked to have this when we first started thinking how to go about leading our school. Thanks to our Million Minute Committee and the CAC ES and MS administration for their support.