My son participated in an attempt to break a Guiness Book of World Records  

His school participated in this event where they all had to read a certain passage simultaneously. It was so neat to see and hear them all and I sure hope they were able to break the record as we won't know for a couple of weeks.

Did anyone else have a child that participated in this event?? If not would you have wanted your child to be able to?

You can read about it: Students and staff at Webb Elementary took part in an event that could set a new world record Wednesday morning.

According to the Guinness Book for World Records, the record for largest number of people reading the same piece of literature aloud simultaneously in multiple locations is 155,528 from 737 schools in the United Kingdom.

The Webb Elementary students, staff and parents took part in an attempt to break that record. And they did so in both English and Spanish.

“Both Webb and Burks Elementary students took part in this, along with Bennett Elementary students,” Christy Hames, Library Media Specialist at Webb, said. “Webb and Burks have one bilingual class per grade. Our older classes had plenty of time to learn the passage in English and could do that. But the first grade class read it in Spanish.”

The passage read was from Chapter Five of “Charlotte’s Web.” Students from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to McKinney and all points in between took part. In Hawaii, the reading took place at 7 a.m.

According to Walden Media, Texas had the most school participating of any state. The smallest school participating had one home school student. The largest school, in Salem, Mass., had 3,086 students. The most schools participating in one city was the Las Vegas School District. The most participants from one school district in the record-setting attempt were in Houston.

Walden media sponsored the event as part of a national campaign to build awareness of “Charlotte’s Web,” in advance of the Dec. 15 opening of the new live action film version of the classic story.

Hames coordinated the event and sent the information to all the schools in the district. She talked about what she hoped the students at Webb would learn from the record-breaking attempt.

“I hope it just helps promote the love and joy of reading,” she said. “The reading here was “Charlotte’s Web,” a good classical reading.”

As for breaking the record, she said it would be some time before it is known if the record was broken.

“I hope to have all my numbers sent out by the end of next week,” Hames said. “Then, once all the readers registrations are received by the Guinness people, it will take four-to-six weeks to learn if we broke the record. The site showed that more than 538,000 had registered to read. If half of them took part, we will have a good shot at breaking the record.”

Approximately 450 students took part at Webb Elementary.