Five million words and 92 books later, Miguel Molano, who just finished the fifth grade, is ranked as the third top student in the Accelerated Reader program in the Brownsville Independent School District.
He came in first place in the fifth grade Accelerated Reader Program district-wide.
On Tuesday night the BISD Board of Trustees recognized Miguel for the 918 points he received in the AR program at Ortiz Elementary School, presenting him with a trophy and several certificates for his accomplishment.
It all started with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first in J.K. Rowling’s widely popular series of children’s books about a boy wizard in London and his adventures at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Molano has read all seven books in the series three times. Wednesday morning he was starting in on a fifth read of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth in the series, while being interviewed about his AR record at the Brownsville Public Library main branch on Central Boulevard.
“I was already a pretty good reader, but when I really started was in 5th grade,” Molano said. “It was when the teacher introduced the class to Harry Potter. … I had just read a lot of books for the first few weeks, and my librarian, Ms. Luna, the librarian at Ortiz, said that I had the potential to beat the record.”
After getting to 100 AR points and earning a field trip, Miguel, who’s in the GT program at Ortiz, just kept on going.
“The record was somewhere in the 700s,” he said. “Once I got to 700, I thought there’s a ton of days left in school why don’t I try to go higher, so then I went up to 800 and I thought there’s still a lot of days left in school, why don’t I go up to 900?”
Miguel’s parents, Eduardo Molano and Lisa Dwyer, say he has his his nose in a book practically all the time. For example, he was reading a book while participating in an end-of-the-year awards ceremony at Ortiz, and while he waited for the recognition agenda item at the BISD board of trustees meeting.
All of his AR books were fiction. He said they take him into a mythical world.
“I play through the book as the main character,” he said. “While I’m reading it I just imagine in my head that I’m the main character, just watching everything that’s happening in the book from inside the book while I’m reading it.” He said he makes up different voices for each of the characters,” who speak in the same voices while he’s reading.
Miguel is also a big fan of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of books by Rick Riordan. He said he’s read most of the books in the series, including the first two, which were made into movies. Although he liked the movies, he likes the books better and wishes the movies followed the books more closely.
“When I went to see the Percy Jackson movie … I saw all this stuff that the main character didn’t do and a lot of stuff that they left out of the movie and stuff that didn’t happen in the book,” he said. “Why is this here and why is that there? No, that’s not right. This happened.”
Miguel and his parents say the fact he was read to from the time he was in the womb might have something to do with him being such an avid reader. Growing up, his older sister Caitlin Dwyer also read to him, her and Miguel’s parents utilizing makeshift puppets and distinctive voices.
Dwyer also credited Melanie Smith, the librarian at Burns Elementary School, who is well known as the animated and performative reader at Zoo Tales, a fundraising event for the Gladys Porter Zoo.
Miguel also was also a member of the chess team at Ortiz (he read during breaks between matches) and a Boy Scout. He marched in the Memorial Day silent March in Brownsville with the Boy Scouts. He also received Master on his three End of Course tests, math, science and reading.
He plays in the Minor League division of Little League Baseball at West Brownsville and is also a volunteer at Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church.
