“I don’t know,” third-grader Kaylynne Skaggs hesitates, though she only verbalizes this to hold the place for a more developed answer. She knows exactly what has drawn her to becoming one of Benton Elementary’s most prolific readers: “When I first started to read, I just loved it.” As an astute lover of multiple subjects, from amber to zen, Kaylynne has already covered the gamut of human experience in the challenging texts she devours. The number of minutes she’s spent in the imaginative chambers of her inner monologue focused on a book or three now numbers close to 1,000.

Understandably, the words Kaylynne encounters increase in difficulty as she discovers new material. “I try to read grown-up books,” she explains, “so I can get to a higher and higher difficulty.” There are tools and strategies around that assist her efforts as she continues her word quest. The most critical approach? Context clues. When Kaylynne finds a word she doesn’t know, she considers the sentence surrounding it. “I read the whole book and then come back and read the sentence, and that tells me more about that word,” she explains. The guesses that follow a rendezvous with an unfamiliar word aren’t a shot in the dark; they’re educated guesses based on the meanings of other words that place the strange word in context. Kaylynne is a detective, not unlike famous literary investigator Sam Spade, who sniffs out the truth on the page by examining the evidence it leaves behind.

By Kaylynne’s account, she holds the title of “the reader” in the family. However, she admits her father’s reading habits are the main inspiration for her momentous reading undertaking. Since she also enjoys math (fractions are easy for her, by the way), we calculated a rough estimate in our head of average words read using her reading minutes benchmark. If Kaylynne reads at the average speed for her grade and has already clocked 900 minutes, she’s soaked up approximately 90,000 words. All around the house and at school, no matter the genre or complexity, Kaylynne puzzles and delights over fresh multisyllabic terms: extraordinary, innovative, persistence, and responsibility, to name only a few out of 90,000.

Responsibility is an essential word in Kaylynne’s life because it describes her expectations for herself in friendships. “I’m a sweet girl. I like making a lot of friends,” she says. The characteristic that emboldens her status as a fantastic friend is her heartfelt loyalty; if you tell her a secret, she will keep it. In her opinion, gossiping about your friend’s business is “rude.” Kaylynne’s sense of responsibility extends to strangers, not only strange words. If she had access to a magic wand, she’d use its hypothetical power to provide unhoused individuals with homes, food, money, and “even books!” There’s a word Kaylynne may have heard before that captures her unflinching commitment to the personal comfort of others: tremendous. As she works her way up to double the current total of minutes spent in her reading zone, she joins a long tradition of ethical education through literature. The more you read, the more you know, and the more you know, the better equipped you are, in third grade or thirteenth, to be there for those who need a helping hand or a secret kept tucked away.