Hello everyone, I've been reminiscing about my childhood and adolescence growing up in this area and one event that sticks out in my mind was in 5th grade in elementary school, we had this event called "Extreme Reading".
Basically it was an annual event for 5th graders where you sleep overnight at the school, bringing your pajamas and a sleeping bag and a lot of books. I forget the exact time it starts but it's something like 5 or 6 PM, and I think it was on a weekday, probably Friday. They provided everyone with pizza, snacks, and drinks for dinner and they even had a guest reader, an author I think, who would read to groups in intervals or something like that. You read all night until 10PM or midnight (I forget the details) when they turn off all the lights and everyone goes to sleep. The next morning, the parents pick them up from school.
When I did Extreme Reading in the 2007-08 school year, I remember everyone set up their sleeping bags in the cafeteria, where they cleared all the tables and had a wide open space. But I think in later years, based off pictures from later yearbooks and on Instagram, they let you setup your sleeping bags all around the school. A cool thing was they even provided everyone with an Extreme Reading branded t-shirt with a cool logo that I'm pretty sure was stylized either "eXtreme Reading" or "Xtreme Reading". I think the one for our year was a sky blue color and the logo had a fiery red, orange, and yellow design to it. Or that could have been my older brother's and I had a different color. Anyways I digress.
The school where this happened is Willow Springs Elementary School in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). The reason I'm asking this question is because when I've been searching for the event online, the only results that come up are from Willow Springs, making me wonder if our school was unique in being the only one that had their students sleep overnight just to read. Did anyone else do this event? And in the small chance anyone reading this went to Willow Springs, do you remember this event? What are your experiences/thoughts on it? And to expand off this, did anyone else have an event unique to their school?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here's a collection of evidence I could find online of Extreme Reading. All are from Willow Springs ES:
• Willow Springs Elementary weekly newsletter from November 16th, 2018 - https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/VAEDUFCPS/bulletins/21a9c62
• Willow Springs Elementary weekly newsletter from November 8th, 2019 - https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/VAEDUFCPS/bulletins/2696af1
• Willow Springs Elementary Twitter posts
- Dated 2015-11-13: https://x.com/WSESfox/status/665334345616330752
- Dated 2017-11-10: https://x.com/WSESfox/status/929145182108385280
- Dated 2018-11-16: https://x.com/WSESfox/status/1063547478090424326
- Dated 2018-11-16: https://x.com/WSESfox/status/1063607469874778112
- Dated 2022-03-31: https://x.com/WSESfox/status/1509638076452282368
• Willow Springs Elementary Instagram Post from January 29th, 2025 - https://www.instagram.com/p/DFa6JSxxye7