As St. Charles North High School student Rebecca Potorny read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle to first graders at Wild Rose Elementary School, the group of students read it back to her.

“This is a familiar story for them,” said first-grade teacher Kathy Pergande, as she watched over the excitable class to make sure they didn’t get too rambunctious. “Now we’re going to work off all of that energy in gym.”

Potorny and 14 other St. Charles area students spread out across the city Oct. 8 to read the 40-year-old book to as many children as possible for “Read for the Record,” an effort to help break the world record for the most times a single book is read to children in a day.

Each reading took about 15 minutes and included a question-and-answer session in which children discussed topics including their favorite things to eat and how caterpillars turn into butterflies.

Pergande said the event could help make the students lifelong readers.

“It’s awesome, it really is,” Pergande said. “It’s a win-win for the children and the young adults from high school.”

Jumpstart, a nonprofit organization dedicated to early childhood education, said on its Web site that the goal was to break its own record from 2008 of reading the same book to more than 700,000 children. This year, the popular Carle book was read to children not only across the Tri-Cities and the United States, but also those in places such as Japan, German and Brazil.

Potorny, a junior at St. Charles North High School and member of the Future Educators Association (FEA), looked relieved once the reading and question-and-answer portion was finished. She said the first graders were a more challenging group than the third graders she had previously led in a reading, but that she would gladly do it all again.

“It’s fun and I enjoyed it,” said Potorny. “It’s a little intimidating at first, but you warm up.”

Potorny, who eventually wants to become a second- or third-grade teacher, said that while teaching the frenzied first graders may not be her first choice, she still loves doing it.

“When I see all of their excited faces, it gets me excited,” Potorny said. “I plan to do it next year.”

Marge Trayser, a first grade teacher at Wild Rose and a co-sponsor of the FEA at North, said they read to 1,400 children in St. Charles alone last year. She estimated that they read to about 525 students at Wild Rose.

Trayser said she’s had kids from the FEA come in and read to students for years, and called literacy a “big thing” in her classroom.

“I read to my students every day,” Trayser said. “But it’s so much fun to have someone else read and know all different people from different walks of life read.”

Trayser said results from how many children have been read to will be announced in the next few weeks.