With a bit of hard work, a new state grant will allow Pennsylvania State University to help open up the world of Dr. Seuss, Harry Potter and Narnia to a whole new generation of readers.

Dr. Wendy Middlemiss of the Shenango campus in Sharon, along with colleagues from other Penn State campuses, won a $1.18 million grant to help teach kids in fifth and seventh grades to read.

"We're targeting fifth- and seventh-graders because at that time their reading capacity changes," she said.

Fifth grade is also the first year the state requires all students to take the Pennsylvania School System Assessment reading and math tests. Also, the federal government has implemented the No Child Left Behind Act, which strongly emphasizes that children know how to read and understand what they're reading. The eventual goal of the educational law is to achieve 100 percent literacy across the nation.

Dr. Middlemiss and her grant-writing team partners, Barbara Van Horn and Bonnie J.F. Meyer of the University Park campus and Kay Wijekumar of the Beaver County campus, will be working to develop an online tutoring program, with the eventual goal that all children be able to access its reading help whenever they need it.

A trial program was conducted at Delahunty Middle School in Hermitage a few years ago. Principal Allan Rummel said that once the scheduling conflicts were straightened out, the program was successful.

"Studies showed the kids benefited from the tutoring," he said. "Overall, the program worked out OK."

The three-year grant will put the research team's ideas to the test in various areas around the state. In the third year of the program, students in Sharon and Farrell will benefit from the tutoring through after-school programs.

"We hope the money gives us a chance to establish a program over the three years and eventually open it up to all students," Dr. Middlemiss said.

The tutoring program will be based on the educational "structure strategy" theory, Dr. Middlemiss said, which teaches kids the way paragraphs are put together to help them use and analyze the passages they are reading.

In the tutoring program, students learn to recognize "signal words" to determine what type of passage they are reading. For example, Dr. Middlemiss said, if students read the words "for example," "such as" or "describing," they would know they are reading a descriptive paragraph.