Weekly Reading Log Homework #1 Parent Signature: Name: Fill & Download for Free

I would search for a simple reading log.Reading logs would keep me highly motivated by having a daily goal of reading x number of pages for homework. Our teacher would ask us a couple of questions about what we read the day before and give us a sticker for completing our goal. When we finished the entire book we would get a prize ( usually “coupons” like no homework, leave for recess early, etc.). Anyway, after a while, you get hooked and can’t stop reading. You are not even doing it for the prize anymore.The teacher usually set a minimum amount of pages for each day. The first couple of days you see it an annoying task but eventually, it turns into a challenge. You want to read more than the minimum number of pages.Our teacher would give us the last 10 minutes of class to read so that we could start on our homework.You can do something similar with your daughter. This example is from when I was in 3rd grade, so adjust as you see fit to her age.Find or make a simple reading log that works for her. Set a minimum number of pages she has to read per day or week whichever works best for you. I recommend daily.Set 5 minutes during the day for reading. It would always have to be at the same time and same place. It has to be a place where you can watch her but it has to be a quiet place. These 5 minutes are not optional but they help her with her reading “homework”Discuss what she read daily or weekly, whichever you prefer. Don’t forget the stickers for the reading log and the prizes can be coupons for different things such as a day of no chores, going to the movies, etc.When I was a teacher for a first-grade class, I would do something similar with coupons and sticker cards for participating in class. Everyone loved it!

Psychology, freshman year of high school. I remember her name, but won’t say it to keep this fair.My first day of school, she noticed my last name…and my resemblance to my brother. “Are you Mark’s brother?”Mark, my oldest brother, is 5 years older than me. In school, he was a notorious troublemaker…not of the fun, mischievous sort, though, more in the spiteful way. This teacher had him in class just a couple years prior.When I said yes, I was Mark’s brother, I didn’t realize that it could be held against me in such a way, but there she was, scowling at me, saying, “I’m going to be keeping my eyes on you.”All semester long, I consistently received grades that I didn’t agree with on my papers. The papers were filled with comments about how I was wrong, or I hadn’t provided justification, etc. If I didn’t cite something correctly, even if it was using a comma instead of a period, that entire citation was ignored throughout the paper.If I volunteered to speak on a topic in class, I would frequently be told I was just plain wrong, even when my answer was directly out of the textbook.I found myself having to do actual homework in an attempt to keep my grade above an F, and one of those items was a log of reading activity during the course of the semester. I began reading at a torrid pace, both filling in the days I’d missed, plus the rest. I had to log the date, the journal, the article, authors, etc., and then my views on the research and how I felt about it. I slowly compiled a full notebook with it.A week before the date for us to turn it in, I was talking with a friend in class, one of those guys who got straight As in class, and we were pondering how the teacher planned to grade these reading logs. We couldn’t see how she’d actually go through 25-or-so journals in our class alone, knowing that she only had a couple days to grade them, not to mention the other 4 classes she taught. We steadily reached the conclusion that there was no possible way she would actually grade them, she would have to just open it, take a look and give it an A. That’s when my friend gave me a confession: “I haven’t done a single one of those…I kept procrastinating on it, so I never even started.” We had a good laugh at the fact that C-student Garrett had done it, while he hadn’t, and I made him an offer: “Dude, seriously, just take mine this weekend, you can probably just copy it word for word and she won’t even notice.”“You serious?”“Yeah man, just take it, she ain’t gonna read it…go for it.”I got my journal back on Monday and turned it in on Tuesday after back-filling for the weekend.That Friday, we received our journal’s back. Inside mine, page after page had been marked with red marker, identifying where she didn’t agree with my thoughts, where she found a flaw in my formatting, cases where she didn’t think the journal was even worth considering, etc. I got an F on my journal.My friend’s journal had 3 or 4 pages marked. “Great analysis!”, “Very well done, I like your thinking” and more. Even in cases where the same page was marked up in each journal, we had entirely different feedback.He got an A.

As I’ve mentioned before when discussing curriculum, it’s easy to get distracted by new ideas. Fortunately, there are expert educators with firm beliefs who can remind us of the important stuff. For today, those experts are Kylene Beers, Donalyn Miller and Teri Lesesne (The Three Wise Women).These literary all-stars posted a Facebook live video the other night in which they discussed the value of reading logs as compared to other ways of keeping kids accountable for their reading. Can you guess what they thought of reading logs?Beers, Lesesne and MillerHere are some highlights from their talk, with my commentary. The big idea is this: students need to choose what they read, and they need to write and speak to each other about this reading. This doesn’t mean the whole class novel is out, but it means that the whole class novel can’t be the only type of reading that students do.Now, on to the Three Wise Women… (all quotes are taken as accurately as possible from the video, bolding is mine)Donalyn Miller:“I did reading logs when I was a new teacher because everyone in my department was doing them. But what I realized that very first year that I taught was that I was chasing the same kids every Friday for their reading logs. And what I realized was that those kids I was chasing were the ones who didn’t have home support, so what was I really grading?”Donalyn makes a few essentials point here:1. She brings up the idea that many new teachers take on the practices of the teachers in their department, even if their teacher preparation program or teaching philosophy differs. I credit my former colleague, Kristen Luettchau, with starting an independent reading program when we worked together. She motivated me to do the same during my first year of teaching, even though it wasn’t the norm at the time.2. Donalyn mentions that the same kids missed the reading logs every week. This shows that the reading log often fails to motivate students or hold them accountable, but it is simply a punitive grading measure that does little to encourage reading. We need better assessment systems than this.3. One might argue that home support is more relevant in the younger grades, when parent support is essential for students doing homework. But the effects of home support on student success don’t disappear as children age, they just change. The child who doesn’t have anyone at home to sign her reading log during fourth grade may be the same child working a job or two after school in 10th grade.Again, from DM:“We really only have two ways of knowing what kids are thinking when they’re reading: what they tell us, and what they write down.”There are only two ways mentioned here. Combine those two with the reading itself, and these three actions should compose the bulk of how students spend their time in our classes. Read a variety of texts, and then write and speak about the ideas and craft of those texts. This immediately brings to mind Dave Stuart Jr.’s These Five Things, All Year Long. Three of the “things” are reading, writing, and speaking, purposefully and often.It is easy to think that the more complex of a system we use, the more accountability measures we have, the more data we have, the better we can teach our students. But when it comes to instruction or assessment, simplicity wins, again and again. Even when my students are reading for 10 minutes, I spend that time having two to three short conversations with students about their reading. In most cases, this is far more valuable than a reading quiz.From Teri Lesesne:“There’s that power of other kids recommending books to other kids. Rather than me always being the one talking about the books.”I like to think that a great teacher makes herself less and less relevant, until her students eventually run the class on their own. A first step towards empowering students in a literacy class is to consistently model how to give book talks, and then expect students to give their own book talks to their classmates when they finish a book.I’ve had the most success in getting students to consistently give book talks when we’ve had a few conversations about the book as they are reading. This way, their thoughts are pre-validated, and I drop a hint like, “Can you tell us about this part of the book when you finish?” Consistent student book talks help build a culture of readers in the classroom like few other instructional practices. (Just ask Gerilyn Lessing)From Kylene Beers, quoting Penny Kittle“She said, ‘We all worry about the summer reading slump...what about kids having a reading slump for nine months?’ When all they do is read four books for the year that the teacher has assigned, and they don’t really read those, they look at the Sparknotes or Wikipedia.”This is a call for balanced curriculum. Is there value in teaching whole class novels? Yes, and I recommend Ariel Sacks’ Whole Novels for the Whole Class. But, it is too easy to fall into the 4X4 curriculum that Beers mentions above, which leaves students doing little to no real reading during the course of the school year. Yes, they may end up reading some short passages in class and echoing the themes discussed by other students. They won’t, though, spend the minutes and hours required to develop reading stamina that will carry them through college and adulthood as a reader.