Coping with nerves can be a tricky thing.

Gwyneth McSween was having a little trouble herself as she sat with a group of fidgety third graders from Broad View Elementary as the curtain was about to rise.

But, in typical 8-year-old fashion, she came up with a strategy to deal with stage fright, and her classmates loved it.

“I got a little nervous so we pretended to throw up on each other,” McSween said.

“She kept pretending to throw up!” Dallin Wright piped in with delight.

Clearly, the method served as an ice breaker for the Broad View third graders, who wound up winning the first-place trophy at the second Island Reading Challenge Wednesday night at Oak Harbor High School.

The competition involved only two elementary schools in the Oak Harbor School District last year, but expanded this year to include all seven elementary schools in the Oak Harbor, Coupeville and South Whidbey school districts.

The program is a collaborative effort of Sno-Isle Libraries and the three school districts with the primary mission of improving the reading levels of elementary school students and making reading fun.

“Statistics show that kids who aren’t reading well by third grade have a higher dropout rate when they get to high school,” said Jane Lopez-Santillana, children’s librarian for the Oak Harbor Library.

“It’s also an age when we can still get kids excited about reading.”

Lopez-Santillana was part of a similar program when she worked in Seattle and wanted to bring it to Whidbey Island.

She teamed up with Kim Kellogg, the K-5 literacy coach for Oak Harbor schools, to start the program in Oak Harbor and watched reading levels from participating third graders at Crescent Harbor and Olympic View elementaries jump significantly last year.

They successfully pitched the idea to expand to the remaining elementary schools on Whidbey Island to make it an all-island event and got an army of volunteers from parents to community members to make it possible.

They were all united by a cause.

“One of the main goals of the Island Reading Challenge is to promote reading as a fun endeavor and to encourage teamwork, just like with sports. Research shows that the more students read, the more success they have in school.”

Kellogg said the competitive part was to build excitement and foster teamwork.

“We really wanted kids to feel positive about this,” she said.

The Island Reading Challenge program started in March after hundreds of books were donated to the island’s pubic elementary schools by Friends of Library groups in Oak Harbor, Coupeville, Freeland and Langley.

These volunteer groups raise money to help provide library programs.

The five Oak Harbor elementary schools received 25 sets of the six-book series used for the Island Reading Challenge.

Once a week, third graders would use their lunch time or give up a recess to participate in the program with a teacher, parent or community volunteer providing guidance.

Books ranged from “The Lemonade War” to “Sarah, Plain and Tall” to “Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School and other Scary Things.”

“It required a lot of additional outside-of-school reading if you wanted to read all six books,” Kellogg said.

Many took that time.

“I read all six,” Jonathan Tang of Broad View said.

“I read five of them,” McSween said.

“I read the same book four times,” added Lindsey Middleton.

Reading comprehension was the barometer for success in the program.

The competition revolved around questions about the books’ subject matter. In the end, the top performing teams from each school advanced to Wednesday night’s Island Reading Challenge grand finale.

Roughly 50 kids representing seven teams competed on the main stage before a crowd that nearly filled the seats in the high school’s student union building.

Participating teams were the Crescent Harbor Page Flippers, Broad View Fast Readers, Coupeville Book Worms, Hillcrest Super Sonic Readers, Oak Harbor Reading Kidz, Olympic View Speed Readers and South Whidbey Warthogs.

After a question was asked, each team would huddle then write down an answer with a designated runner taking the piece of paper to an event official.

Of the 24 questions posed during three rounds of competition, Broad View earned a perfect score.

Lopez-Santillana said the participants in the program were not a reflection of simply the most advanced learners, but of a broad spectrum of students eager to participate. She said the idea was to expose all kids to more reading and inspire them to want to continue.

Two years ago, the Oak Harbor schools received a three-year grant from the Department of Defense to promote reading in children preschool through fifth grade called “Early Reading, Lifelong Success.” The Island Reading Challenge is part of the effort to strengthen literacy.

“I had many parents come up to me and say, ‘I couldn’t get them to read a book. Now we’re reading every night,’” Lopez-Santillana said.

“We didn’t talk about this as winners or non-winners, because everyone is winning.”