Reading Logs: Part One - Time to Revise

Nightly reading logs.  Those buggers have been on my mind for months now.  Do they encourage and instill life long reading habits, or do they turn off kids from reading for pleasure since it's usually "assigned homework" and not self-instigated reading?  I witnessed the negative effects of reading logs first hand this past school year with my first grade daughter, Addison.  And to add fuel to the fire, I was the teacher who assigned the nightly reading!  This added an entirely different dimension to the situation, to say the least.  Yes, it was an interesting year being my daughter's first grade teacher!  I'm moving to second grade this coming school year, and NO, she won't be looping with me. :)

The reading bug hasn't bitten Addison yet.  I'm still waiting to find her curled up with a book in a corner of our house, or under her bed.  She LOVES books, and absolutely loves to be read to, but she's not reading for pleasure on her own.....yet.  As the school year progressed, I noticed that reading was becoming a chore for her.  It was as if I was forcing her to finish the broccoli on her plate.  This was NOT the effect I was going for as her teacher and most importantly, avid reader MOM!  How many other families were experiencing this with their new readers? 

 

Apparently other educators are having the same misgivings about reading logs, check out this blog post by Matt Renwick, a principal/blogger in Wisconsin.

  

The hard part about this dilemma is we know so much about the importance of reading volume, and how closely reading volume is tied with so many aspects of success later in life.  How can we encourage kids to read for pleasure outside of school?  The amount of reading (and kinds of reading) that happens in many classrooms is not enough.  Especially with current curriculum demands that many schools and districts are entrenched in, which focuses on whole group and small group instruction, with little time for independent, self-selected reading.  In this Common Core crazed world, we need to create classroom communities where reading for the pure joy of reading is the norm, and it oozes out the doors of our classrooms, down the street and into the homes of our students.  Donalyn Miller (The Book Whisperer) has some cool suggestions in her book Reading in the Wild, which I'm engrossed in currently.  Long story short:  I plan to revise my reading log practices.  What will this look like?  I'll let you know when I figure it out. But it won't involve forcing broccoli on anyone.