Books of summer
<p>Winton Elementary students Trevor Carpenter, center, and Nathan Ralston hold the Coeur d'Alene Public Library Summer Reading Traveling Trophy with Susan Thorpe, Youth Supervisor for the public library, left, and Beth Dane, Winton School Librarian. Trevor and Nathan were two of 59 students from Winton who participated in Summer Reading.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Children who spend part of their summers reading return to school in the fall better equipped to learn. The kids at Winton Elementary demonstrated that they are readers by being the first winners of the Coeur d'Alene Public Library Summer Reading Traveling Trophy.
According to Susan Thorpe, youth supervisor for the library, children visiting the library and participating in Summer Reading not only had the opportunity to win prizes, but also got to vote for their school during each visit. According to the ballots, 59 students from Winton visited the library 187 times and earned the right to display the trophy in their school library until next summer.
Winton School Librarian Beth Dane told her students at an assembly Friday, "Winton is a school of readers."
She noted that the students and their families are "100 percent responsible for the new books we were able to add to the library last year - 317 books ... filling up our library to a total of 9,326 books."
She said in the past year students checked out 13,000 books and that students in third, fourth and fifth grades passed 2,989 Accelerated Reading tests - for a total of 18,151, 970 words. Dane gave special recognition to student Sarena Kaschmitter for reading more than one million words on her own.