Mrs. Vanessa Galvan-DeLeon’s fifth grade class who read over 100 books to benefit the Scholastic Book Club’s ClassroomsCare program. (Photo by Erika Hernandez) St. Gertrude Catholic School’s “Team Peyton”, made up of Mrs. Vanessa Galvan-DeLeon’s fifth grade class, have met their goal in reading 100 books as part of Scholastic Book Club’s ClassroomsCare program.

The program, which the class signed up for in October, is a literacy campaign which was created to teach children the joys and importance of reading and giving.

Classes around the country are reading 100 books each by Dec. 18, 2009 and when they meet that goal, Super Bowl MVP’s Peyton and Eli Manning are teaming up with Scholastic, and their charity partners who will then put one million books into the hands of the neediest children.

In order to participate, classrooms pick either “Team Peyton” or “Team Eli” and keep track of their progress using a classroom size ClassroomsCare poster.

Students kept track of their progress by writing their name on the “Team Peyton” Classrooms Care poster once they completed a book. (Photo by Erika Hernandez) This year so far, there have been 3,047,640 books read by Team Peyton and 3,027,433 by Team Eli.

Since its launch in 2001, Scholastic Book Club’s ClassroomsCare initiative has enriched the lives of over 36 million children nationwide.

More than 27,114,000 students from over 1,084,500 classrooms have participated in ClassroomsCare activities, resulting in the donation of over 9 million books to children in need.