Since starting kindergarten, we’ve had to keep track of The Tiny Human’s reading. His goal is 15 minutes of reading or more at least 16 times per month (as set by the school). We’ve been keeping track, but on the calendar grids sent home from school and now a simple lined list. Neither of these provide enough room for me to write the title of a book.
When I look at these calendars and lists, my teacher-brain does that thing where it tilts to the side and goes, “hmmmmm…”. I feel like any homework should serve to inform instruction–not just of kids, but of families. So how can we make a reading log functional? Not just a list of titles (or chapter numbers, in our case), but informative.
Now, I know that the teacher is seeing what types of books are being read at home and what topics are popular. This can inform instruction by allowing the introduction of interest-based activities, but you can get that information a lot more quickly through a student interest survey (and introduce the concept of surveying, which my students almost invariably love). Reading to meet the goal of 15 minutes a day, 16 days per month, for the 10 months of the school year comes out to 2400 minutes of reading (or 40 hours). I feel like we can gather more information, make it more useful.
So let’s look at what information was missing and how we collect it as simply as possible so that we’re not adding WAaaayyy more work to any stressed-out parent’s life. How about this?
With this log (which has enough rows for 31 days), you can see:
- the dates people are reading
- the titles and genres that they’re reading
- who is doing the reading
I’ve felt like this was a majorly missing component of the book logs thus far. Yes, reading with and to kids is incredibly valuable, but it’s a different than a child doing the reading. This way, it’s easy for families and the teacher to see what kind of reading is happening at home.
If, as a teacher, you see that any families are consistently “reading to”, those caregivers may need support on how to help their emerging readers. Here are some great, simple strategies that can be printed, copied, and sent home:
Posted by Debbie Bushey, created by Dolores Hudson:
**Please note that I wrote “Caregiver” in the final column. I strongly feel that, as teachers, we need to watch our language around addressing families. There are too many different family structures to assume that children are with their biological parents all the time. It may be a stepparent, a foster parent, a family member, a nanny… using “caregiver” and “family” in place of parents can make a huge difference in creating an inclusive classroom environment.**
If you need to encourage families to read at home, here is a great article, that is short and to the point, about the importance of reading to children.
Tomorrow, we’ll take it a step further and develop a stronger home/school connection by adding another simple component. 🙂