>>>>What do you do to encourage reading for middle school students at home >>>>and in class? Do you have reading logs for your students or how do you >>>>encourage reading & responding?
We have a schoolwide reading log that parents are supposed to initial every night. It is checked off every morning by the teachers and the students without the parent initials get to read after school in the library for an hour. Additionally, all grades have some kind of weekly response reflection. In the 6-8th grade my students are required to respond to their reading four times a week. Each entry is at minimum three paragraphs and written in friendly letter format. They may not summarize, I am looking for connections, questions, predictions, inferences and character analysis. At the beginning of the year, or whenever a new student arrives, they get a hardbound composition notebook and the handouts including a rubric that explains the process. I even have a list of suggested topics to write about and a rubric. Somewhere on my computer is also a model letter. I have over 500 books in my classroom with a wide variety of genres and range of difficulty. We also have community read which is an all school silent reading for the first 20 minutes of the school day. I take their notebooks weekly, read them and respond to their letters. It takes time, but I get an incredible amount of data on each student. Incidentally, we are a Title I school, 90% on free and reduced lunch and over 80% are considered ELL. Lise _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
