Reading For Pizza And The Kraken

Fourth grader Rohan Agarwal admits his classroom had some help in getting competitive about reading books. 

It didn’t hurt that his favorite local hockey team was running the statewide Kraken Book Club Challenge that spurred Agarwal’s class at Hazel Wolf K-8 ESTEM School to spend the entire month of March logging their reading minutes to try for a promised pizza party prize. By the time it was done, their winning total worked out to 67 hours reading per student over the monthlong span, which was enough to best the entries of 83 other schools in 35 different communities. 

“When we heard there was a sports team involved and it’s a home Seattle sports team, we wanted to support it,” Agarwal, 9, said this week, moments after his class was informed it had won the contest and a $750 pizza party budget courtesy of the team, along with selected Kraken classroom décor and student giveaways . “It’s our team and we always root for them win or lose. It’s always fun to see them play. So, when we saw it was the Kraken running it, we tried to push our limits.” 

And push those limits they did, racking up more than 100,000 total hours of reading.  

“Our class had some really fast readers and so we could read tons of books that added up to more and more minutes of reading,” Agarwal said. “And once we added up the scores, it would be huge every week. It was crazy because it would always be over 1,000. It was just awesome to see how we read.”

The good news about the contest win saw the elated class treated to an in-person visit from none other than Kraken mascot Buoy, who posed for photographs inside the classroom with the students and signed autographs for them. The mascot had already made a scheduled school assembly visit to the school that morning in front of roughly 700 students and teachers as part of the Buoy Trivia Extravaganza Tour, a school show facilitated by the Kraken Fan Development team. The show, along with the reading program, ball hockey clinics, player visits, and a staff speaker series are part of club’s Kraken School Network programming.  

Buoy and handler, Hailey Robinson co-hosted a game-show style event where two teams of four pre-selected students were brought up in front of the packed gymnasium to answer a series of trivia questions on topics ranging from health and exercise to Kraken players and hockey terminology.  

Agarwal’s class sat through the half-hour show, for students from kindergarten-through-eighth grade, unaware of what was coming next before returning to class and being informed of their Kraken Cook Club Challenge victory. Participating classrooms in the contest submitted 4,091,865 minutes and the top three finishers all received the pizza party budgets plus décor, while their teachers were given gift certificates to Amazon and the Kraken Team Store. 

Fourth grade teacher Erika Prins, who found out about her Hazel Wolf class’s victory at the same time as her students, said they’ve been prodding her for weeks for an update as to who’d won. 

“I hadn’t heard anything, so I kind of told them I didn’t think we’d won,” she said. “So, this was a great surprise. They were all very excited about the potential of winning. They’re very competitive. I even had parents keep talking to me about how they wanted to win and how they didn’t even want to play their video games because they wanted to spend the time reading instead.”

Students would log their daily reading time and then add up the minutes collectively each week. Prins said she was impressed by how the competition fostered elements of teamwork and accountability. 

“Students reminded each other to log their reading and celebrated each other’s progress,” Prins said. “In my class, the students set monthly goals, and I had a lot of students who set theirs around how many minutes they wanted to try to read -- no doubt encouraged by this challenge. The program also encouraged goal setting, persistence, and peer support in a natural way.” 

She was even able to incorporate the reading contest into some of her math classes. 

“I changed some of the math problems,” she said. “We were doing long division and so I worked with separating some things out and going, ‘If we read this many pages a week on average as a class, then how many would each student read?’ They calculated totals, compared daily and weekly minutes and even created their own word problems based on their totals.” 

Prins, a Kraken fan since the franchise’s inception, said having the team stage the competition and then Buoy paying a personal classroom visit meant a lot. 

“It’s amazing,” she said. “I think it’s showing them their hard work paid off and that the Kraken think it’s something very important. So, getting to see that a big, huge organization like the Kraken is supporting them and that they are being appreciated by the team – instead of them appreciating the team – that role reversal is so special and probably going to be a core memory of all this.” 

Karis Wong, 9, said her father takes her to numerous Kraken games and having the team involved in the contest kept her entire class focused.

“A lot of us like the Kraken,” she said. 

Her favorite part of the contest was figuring out just how much time she actually spends with books. 

“I really like reading and I’d never really calculated how long I did it for,” Wong said. “It’s just fun to add all our scores up.” 

And to partake in the pizza spoils, which Wong and classmates such as Agarwal spent much of their celebratory morning inquiring about. 

Agarwal said there’d been growing anticipation amongst the class for weeks that they might have done enough to pull out a pizza victory. 

“We just kept adding it up and up,” he said. “And then one week, we just couldn’t hold it in and we got really, really excited by the results. We were just amazed by what we’d pulled off even though we didn’t know how many other schools were out there trying to compete. But we did it.”