Working as an intervention specialist for New Jerusalem Elementary School, I’ve seen a tremendous need to motivate and excite students about reading. There are so many activities that pull kids away from reading.

I thought a lot about how to motivate students to read and pulled some ideas from previous volunteer work and came up with Bead-to-Read.

Kids love earning tangible items, especially beads. So, I thought, for each 50 pages a student reads, they’ll earn one bead. If a student reads 250 pages a month, that’s five beads.

One special prize was created for kids who read a ton. For every 500 pages, they earned a glow-in-the-dark bead. It was a hit, and students were collecting beads throughout the school year and putting them in their personalized ziplock bags.

I offered students the opportunity to make bracelets and necklaces, and one boy even made something for his ceiling fan with his glow-in-the-dark beads. Pretty creative!

One of my greatest memories was when a fourth-grade boy named Alfred Robinson, after adding all his pages of reading, did this amazing “happy dance jive” with a huge smile on his face. It is so exciting to see a kid succeed and have fun.

Bead-to-Read, which started in August, was a program I came up with to fill a need for students who weren’t getting into reading. It also was created to raise test scores in the area of English language arts and boost S.T.A.R. test scores, with an overall goal of getting kids excited about reading and accomplishing new goals.

This program involved about 40 students, with whom I also worked on test-taking skills and lessons designed to strengthen their skills in the areas of math and language arts for the S.T.A.R. test. My students read thousands of pages and made huge gains in their reading comprehension level, as well as math.

The students that I worked with this year weren’t doing poorly. This group of students was chosen because we wanted to boost them up academically.

Halfway through the year, two seventh-grade students, Taylor Thomsen and Jackie Huaracha, came up with a fun and crazy idea. So I listened. They proposed that if most of the students made huge gains in their reading, the last day of school would be called Pink & Purple Day for Bead-to-Read. They also told me that they wanted me to wear a tutu and have pink or purple hair. So, on the last day of school, we celebrated the students’ success — with me sporting a tutu and pink hair. It was a blast!

• Jennifer Teeters is an intervention specialist and teacher at New Jerusalem Elementary School.