[LIT] Reading Question Response

[Lise]

>>>>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