Reading Response Home Reading Log {Freebie}

Happy weekend, friends! I hope everyone is having a great day! :) Today is a busy one for me, oh my goodness in about a month we're moving and school starts again.  Oh my word.  Talk about craziness, but it's a good kind of crazy!  We were able to "sneak" into our house last night because all the doors are now locked, and saw our hardwoods, cabinets, and crown molding were installed.  Yay! Plus they painted earlier in the week, so our house is really coming along.  :) 

Earlier in the week, I shared my resources for my reading response journals on Amber's blog. 

This freebie has been downloaded from TpT almost 1,500 times! Wowzers. :) This easy to implement reading resource is one of my favorite resources to use in the classroom and I'm so HAPPY that many of you found it useful too.  

 Today I wanted to share with you another reading response freebie with you, my home reading log.  I used this baby for four years when I taught third grade, and LOVED it. 

 

Interested? Download it {here}. 

Thanks to Scrappin' Doodles, Hello Literacy, and Fabulous in First for the graphics and fonts.  Love them! 

Each week I required my kiddos read 100 minutes a week.  Our reading log went home on Mondays and was due the following Monday.  Ideally, I encouraged my kiddos to read 20 minutes a night, five days a week, but with sports, dance, and all the other things kiddos were involved in, I often saw logs with 50 minutes during the week and then 50 minutes over the weekend.  

Third grade, in my state, is the first year our kiddos take high stakes assessments.  What most of them really struggled with at the beginning of the year in third grade was creating decent responses to test questions, as so many wanted to write simple response made up of just a few words.  My reading response journals and reading response home reading logs, in addition to regular classroom practice and instruction, really helped my third graders get comfortable with creating quality reading responses.  

I stressed what quality responses looked like at open house with the parents, and put a completed reading log in my parent resource packet.  This really helped the families in my room really understand what was expected of their child.  

I monitored my kiddo's reading logs pretty carefully.  If they were reading the same book over and over again, I would let them take books from our classroom library home, and when the public library's bookmobile came to our school, really encouraged them to pick out books for their reading log.  I also used their ratings of books to help me decide what books to order from our book orders. :)

My fourth grade team does not do reading logs. I know there has been a lot of talk recently that reading logs can do more harm than good and cultivate readers who just read until a timer goes off and then stops, instead of readers who do have a passion for reading.  That was my team's rationale for no longer requiring them, which I totally understand too! 

I don't quite know what the plan is for reading practice at home this year, as I feel reading practice is so important, at home and at school.  My plan currently is to  implement reading challenges such as adapting this book challenge that I used from The Teacher Wife with my second graders, to fit my fourth grader's needs or doing monthly reading challenges, no idea what this would look like yet. Or just simply do the reading chain that I've been doing with my summer school kiddos, and once the chain reaches a certain length, rewarding the class with a prize. My summer kiddos are loving it.  Obviously, my mind is still brewing up ideas. :) 

If you don't require a nightly reading log, do you do any incentives to get kiddos still doing some reading at home? If so, please share! :)  I'd love to hear what you're doing. :)