Schoolchildren Show Voluminous Appetite in 7-Week Binge on Books

Maybe Johnny can’t read. But Dylan can. So can James and Boyd.

So when the call went out in November, those three--along with 800 or so of their Carpenter Avenue School mates--were ready to put their skills to work. Their task: to read as much as they could in a seven-week “read-a-thon.”

Squeezing a quarter or two out of mom and dad for every book they read, the children at the Studio City school brought in more than $9,000. World Book, the encyclopedia publishers, chipped in $6,000, bringing the total to $15,000.

That money was used to buy more books: 17 new 22-volume sets of encyclopedias. Those new sets mean each of Carpenter’s 27 classrooms has its own, something a World Book official said no other school in the nation can claim.

The encyclopedia company runs similar “read-a-thons” at schools across the country.

New encyclopedias may not be on every third-grader’s top 10 list of nifty stuff, but at an awards ceremony Friday, the kids at Carpenter seemed to take pride in their sets. After all, they earned them.

“It is an incredible thing that you’ve done,” Claude Swonger, district manager for World Book, told the semicircle of schoolchildren who sat cross-legged on the blacktop. “You were the ones who put your noses between the pages and read.”

And in the process, the children said they found that reading was kind of fun.

“I like stuff in space and in stars,” said third-grader Boyd Cooper, whose friends call him B.J. “My favorite planet is Saturn. I like to read about Saturn.”

As far as the encyclopedias went, Cooper said he could use them to look up information about gems and coins, two things he’s developed an interest in lately.

The encyclopedias already have come in handy. Teacher Wendy Raksin said her class looked up the entry on Braille after a question came up during a story about how dogs help the blind.

Dylan Sculley, 9, finished off 10 books in seven weeks. Among his favorites was a book detailing the process of milk production. You know, how milk is pasteurized and “homogized” after it comes out of the cow.

His friend, 8-year-old James Duffey, said he read 16 books, most of them about whales. But his reading skill was not what James wanted the world to know about Friday.

“I eat parts of my shoe,” he said, shoving a piece of white rubber into his mouth.