Lakeside Elementary students win bikes for reading

Six Lakeside Elementary students read their way to a new bicycle this year through the Bigfork Masonic Lodge’s Bikes for Books program.

The program is in its sixth year at LES and principal John Thies said the program is a great way to motivate students. Each student who reads gets a chance to win a bicycle.

“The incentive is the more you read, the higher the chance you have of getting your name drawn,” Thies said.

For the last two months of the school year kindergarten through fourth-graders get points for the program based on how many books they read. The fifth-grade classes run it through an accelerated reader computer program. Once a fifth-grader finishes a book, they take a comprehension exam and gain points based on how well they understood the book.

Each point is a ticket and all the tickets for each grade go into a bucket. The more a student reads, the more tickets they get in the bucket.

“Those buckets were pretty full, it shows the kids have done a lot of reading,” Thies said. “I would say it has to help (get students to read more).”

A winner was drawn for each grade at an assembly on May 23. Those winners are kindergartener Audrey Nelson, first-grader Noah Poe-Hatten, second-grader Luke Garrigan, third-grader Tad Simonson, fourth-grader Truss Eastwood and fifth-grader Naomi Heavilin.

Thies works with Bigfork Mason Lodge member LeRoy Lau to run the program at Lakeside Elementary. Lau started calling the bike winners last week to set up a time to go pick out the bicycles. The bikes will be purchased from Walmart and paid for by a combination of funds from the Grand Lodge of Montana and the Bigfork Masonic Lodge.

Swan River School also participated in the Bikes for Books program through the Bigfork Masonic Lodge, but rather than run it for the last two months of the school year, Swan River ran it for the whole school year.

Each grade level uses the accelerated reader program to gauge reading comprehension and gain points. Based on those points, the top reader in each grade is rewarded with a bicycle.

SRS Principal Peter Loyda said this is the ninth year they’ve run the program.

Loyda agrees with Thies and thinks the bike incentive is an effective tool for stimulating extra reading at home.

“We don’t get as much reading done at home as we’d like,” Loyda said. “We think we get more books checked out and taken home, we get more kids who are reading at home with that incentive.”

The ultimate goal is to get children to continue reading after the program is over.

“Those kids who have won bikes before are still our top readers because they love it so much,” Loyda said.

But each kid only gets one chance to win a bicycle. If a previous winner wins again, they get a gift certificate for Book Works in Kalispell and the runner-up claims the bicycle prize.

Cayuse Prairie School and Bigfork Elementary School have participated in past years, but Lau said both opted out of participating this year. Each year the Bigfork lodge gives away an average of 18 bicycles to schools that run the program.

The Grand Lodge of Montana started the program over a decade ago and each Masonic lodge in the state can opt to participate.

“We feel that community involvement in education is an asset to the community,” Lau said. “It’s vital to the young men and women that they get a good education.”