OKLAHOMA CITY, Tuesday, May 23, 2017 – Throughout the last week, the Thunder recognized four students across Oklahoma who tallied the most reading minutes in their respective grade levels in this year’s Thunder Reading Challenge, presented by American Fidelity.
The winners in each of the four grade levels received a personalized plaque, a 2016-17 team-autographed basketball and other Thunder prizes.
Analia Lopez of Kaiser Elementary in Oklahoma City won the kindergarten level, tallying 24,855 minutes of reading this school year.
Titan Smith-Dunn took home first-grade honors with his 25,080 minutes of reading. Titan attends Waynoka Elementary in northwest Oklahoma.
The top overall winner for the Thunder Reading Challenge was Dalilah Ojeda, a second-grader at Capitol Hill Elementary in Oklahoma City. Her 34,885 minutes of reading topped this year’s program and won her school a Rumble school assembly.
The third-grade winner hails from Cedar Ridge Elementary in Tulsa. Jaxson Boyd logged 22,921 minutes of reading.
The more than 46,000 students who participated in this year’s Thunder Reading Challenge totaled more than 28 million minutes of reading, which is equivalent to more than 19,700 days of reading. The program included 2,158 classrooms from 555 schools across the state of Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE THUNDER READING CHALLENGE: The Thunder Reading Challenge is part of the Thunder Read to Achieve initiative, presented by American Fidelity Assurance Company. The program, which is open to kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, challenges young readers to develop good reading habits and a love of reading. Students track their minutes throughout the school year, and the Thunder honors top classroom readers every month and top overall winners at the end of the year.