It’s Teacher Appreciation Week in the US, and we’re thrilled to appreciate Mr. Roger Erickson, an amazing educator at the Flaming Sword Christian Academy in Hope Hills, North Carolina.

Mr. Erickson contacted our support team last week with a technical question about our national leaderboard of words read per student on the My Stats section of Read to Lead.

Through our conversations, we learned that Mr. Erickson initially attempted to use Read to Lead as a literacy supplement with his small class of students, but struggled to capture their imagination. Soon Mr. Erickson took another tack! He began to emphasize the strong life skills and leadership aspects of Read to Lead, which made the literacy aspect less daunting and quickly drew his students into the role of the boss in our games, the challenge of managing a virtual workplace, and the excitement of big decisions!

But Mr. Erickson had yet another engaging idea for his students! He noticed the words read metric on the My Stats section of Read to Lead, in particular the leaderboard of the top 50 other classes around the country in terms of words read. Mr. Erickson challenged his students to read 250,000 words collectively on Read to Lead and break into the top 10 classes in the country. Well, his students rose to that challenge within days, then rose to the next challenge of the top 5 a few weeks later!

We couldn’t be more proud of this amazing achievement and decided to celebrate together with Mr. Erickson by sending fancy new business cards for his students that read “I’m the boss!”, supporting a special pizza lunch for his entire class, and posting the story of his achievement on our blog!

Congratulations to Mr. Erickson for his enthusiasm about Read to Lead, for his creative and engaging instruction, and for his commitment to literacy and leadership in each and every student of his class!

We appreciate you, Mr. Erickson.