West Middleton reading program reaches students globally

Andrea Anderson:

Pernille Ripp needed a change.

The West Middleton Elementary School teacher was unhappy with her teaching methods, felt she wasn't doing her students justice and had no idea how she was going to fix it.

Then, one summer night in 2010, Ripp and her husband, Brandon, were driving down a road in Lodi listening to author Neil Gaiman speak about his One Book, One Twitter project in which people read the same book and discuss it on Twitter using the same hashtag.

"I looked at my husband and said that would be so cool to do with kids," Ripp said. "And he was like, 'Yeah, you should do that.'"

And so she created the Global Read Aloud Program that now has 132,000 students globally and revitalized her love for teaching.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 10, 2013 12:35 AM
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