Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Reading Logs

Hi 3rd Grade Family,

A number of parents have asked me about reading logs and how they work so I decided to make an up-date just on that.  Here's how they work.


We started the year with the children getting a reading log from me, but I've stopped this because by now the children should know how to set them up using their own paper.  This saves the school paper and it allows them to build their own logs to their taste.  That gives them more room to write, to make comments, and so on.

The log should have the following minimums:

*Name of the text.

*Author of the text.  (this builds awareness of who writes their books so the children can follow authors they like)

*Page read (ex. pp. 12-29.  This gives me a feel for their reading endurance)

*Comments (This can be as simple as a couple of sentences as a summary for what they read to a critique of the text or what they think about characters and their actions in the text.  I want them to show me their thinking and connections to the text as much as possible, so stay away from just pure summary work if possible.  However during some weeks, like this week, I do ask for summary work because it matches up with current reading skill:  summary and main idea/supporting details.

As long as hour child's reading logs have these minimum items then they are fine.  They can add more though!  They can tell me how many "fingers" a book is (as in how many words he didn't know out of the first 100), they can add a summary column and an opinion column, they can also list interesting words, whatever strikes their fancy.

The weekly reading log  is great practice in both reading and writing.  The more practice your child gets then the better reader and the more confident writer they will become..







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