Well, the original genesis for the 40-book challenge, which I talk about in The Book Whisperer, was that I wanted my students to really have a high bar for their reading. That number didn’t come up randomly. It really came from what was my total influence on the reading lives of my students. Forty weeks. Thirty-six weeks of school and four weeks of school vacation.
It’s about a book a week. Now, that’s a high bar, but if I set a lower bar, if I expected my students to only read 10 books in a school year, they might read a lot less than 10 and they might not start until April. So, 40 books meant let’s get started, let’s get going. We have a high bar. It does cause a little bit of anxiety in children and their parents at the beginning of the year, but once we get into the groove of it, parents and children are really surprised about how much reading they can accomplish.
It’s also not a contest or a competition. The students are not competing for each other. There are no award ceremonies at the end of the year, no celebrations, no pizza parties over who met the 40‑book challenge. The students who – and no punitive grading. So, students who read 19 books in a year can be just as successful in language arts class as the students who read 66. The main goal of that challenge is to expose students to a wide range of literature, encourage them to try a little bit of everything so they can become strong, capable readers of just about any text.
But I also want my students to try a little bit of everything in the hopes that they find the one thing, the one thing that really resonates with them as a reader that they might not have found on their own without that challenge to dip their toes in and try something new like poetry or science fiction or non‑fiction texts.
I have seen over the years since The Book Whisperer has come out a lot of corruptions of that idea in a way that I think is actually more harmful for children than it is helpful or supportive. Things like incentivizing the 40-book challenge, creating a competition, or creating a situation where students who might read less than 40 books receive lower grades in language arts class than children who might read more.
And that really does not value those true tenets that I originally intended and created in the challenge in the first place. It has to be about meeting children where they are, about really seeing them as readers, and moving them along a path towards lifelong reading that values their experiences, their choices, and their unique needs. It’s not about putting a number onto something and using that as a marker of reading accomplishment or ability.
