Reading Logs and the School Librarian

Posted on April 28, 2018 by Barbara Paciotti

Do your teachers use Reading Logs to document student reading? Does your “school policy” dictate that teachers employ reading logs with students? If so, you—and some of your teachers—may be asking these questions:

What is the purpose of reading logs?
Are some reading logs better than others?
What are the alternatives to reading logs?

If you were an elementary or ELA teacher before becoming a School Librarian you may accept reading logs as a normal part of the classroom experience. I’m a School Librarian from a different subject background, and I have some concerns about this practice.

THE PURPOSE OF READING LOGS

Many teachers believe a reading log is a good way to develop students as readers:

They keep track of books they’ve read and which ones they liked.
They learn which kinds of stories (subjects/genres) they prefer.
They self-assess and understand themselves as readers.
Teachers can dialogue with students about their reading.

These are admirable purposes, but too often the result is forced daily reading and recording the number of minutes and/or pages on a chart, to be signed by a parent, and turned in to the teacher. I saw hundreds of these during a quick image search, and here’s a typical layout:

Unfortunately, this type of reading log doesn’t really fulfill any of a reading log’s intended purposes!

Such reading logs were the topic a few years ago on Scott McLeod’s blog “Dangerously Irrelevant”, based on a blog post by parent Lisa Morguess, who had this to say:

A reading log says, “I don’t trust you to read.”
They turn reading into a chore.
Time spent matters more than content or understanding.
This is not learning – it’s obedience.

There were dozens of comments on both posts, and commenter Mark was particularly anguished:

I shudder at the very recent memory of my 5th grade daughter proudly bringing me her reading log to show me how much she had read this week and then, of course, get me to sign it. My daughter loves to read, but now her pride is…her log, rather than discussing her books in great detail as she did just this past summer, when there was no log.

As a School Librarian, I believe this type of reading log is not about students at all–it’s about teacher accountability. How else can a teacher “prove” that they are “teaching” kids to “love reading”? For many years we had free reading at our school with great success. One year teachers were told to have students “document” the time they were reading by filling out reading logs and using weekly bookmarks with daily questions to answer. To comply, some teachers even began to dictate what kind and how many books students must check out at their library visits. Well, that year our state test scores dropped, and some of our best ELA teachers left for less rigid environments. All the fun had gone out of reading, so the next year we went back to free—and undocumented—reading (and our reading scores went back up)!

SOME READING LOGS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS

As a Middle School Librarian I realized students do like to keep track of books they read, so I created a simple Reading Record with space for the title and author of the book and a star rating for students to indicate how much they enjoyed the book. It wasn’t required and the forms were on the circulation desk for students to put into their binder. This type of record isn’t discouraging—it builds pride in a personal accomplishment.

Then, four consecutive developments prompted me to re-evaluate reading promotion:

We became an International Baccalaureate school, which encourages global-mindedness.
I reorganized our Fiction book area by Subjects (genres) using pictorial spine stickers & color transparent label covers.
The district English Language Arts department launched the Reader/Writer Workshop model with students using interactive Reader/Writer Notebooks.
The district Social Studies department instituted Interactive Notebooks and advocated for more content area reading to support their curriculum.

I could see an interconnection and devised a new strategy to promote more—and better—student reading. First, I identified more Fiction books with multicultural characters and added relevant spine stickers. While reorganizing Fiction, I created 3 Special Collections for Social Studies, one of which focused on global books. Finally, I modified my Library Orientation Lessons to incorporate the wide variety of reading options and created brand new Reading Records:

For ELA, a legal-sized sheet for students to fold in half and paste into their Reader/Writer Notebook:
click to enlarge
1. a reading chart with images of the 8 main Fiction Subject stickers,
2. a chart with images of 5 Multicultural stickers,
3. a chart with 2 additional Fiction Subject stickers, our State Reading List sticker, a space for an expository text informational book, and a space for a poetry book.

I later modified this Reading Record by moving the State Reading list to the Multicultural chart and added grade-level Social Studies books to the third chart so students (by agreement between teachers) could enter the same Narrative Fiction and Expository Informational books for both classes.

For Social Studies, a letter-sized sheet for students to paste into their Interactive Notebook, one for each course:
1. a chart for 6g with images of the continents identifying their GlobeTrekker collection
2. a chart for 7g with reading options for their Sensational State collection (Totally Texas for us)
3. a chart for 8g with reading options for their Read America collection

My ELA teachers are elated with their new Reading Record and prefer it over the one provided by the district. Social Studies teachers also appreciate their customized Reading Record to promote content area reading. Now, I copy and distribute enough Reading Records to ELA and Social Studies teachers so each student can paste one into their Reader/Writer and Interactive Notebooks when they create them during the first week of school.

ALTERNATIVES TO READING LOGS

To help students locate and keep track of similar kinds of stories, I’ve created topical bookmarks. Copied to both sides of colorful card-stock and cut apart, I provide over 2 dozen different bookmarks to students, and they’re a big hit. Some students use the same topical bookmark over and over, so they can track books read by crossing off titles as they read them. Other students use them as a search tool, choosing a new one each time they visit to try a new book topic.

Snip of several colorful topical bookmarks side-by-side

Colorized examples of topical bookmarks

While reading the comments on the blogs mentioned above, I thought Mike F’s comment would be a cool idea for older students:

I love an alternative model from Jim Mahoney in his awesome book, Power and Portfolios. He does “literary letters” where students write more deeply about what they are reading and thinking, and exchange letters with classmates about once a week.

Student Reading Logs can be horribly discouraging for students or they can be valuable enhancements to any reading program for English Language Arts and other content areas. A perceptive School Librarian can see the interconnections between content reading and develop tools that will make a School Library Reading Program preferred by teachers and enjoyed by students.

If you, too, want to increase reading & improve student achievement, get Reading for ELA, Content Reading for Social Studies, or the Reading Promotion for ELA & Social Studies bundle from my NoSweat Library store on TeachersPayTeachers.

5 Essential Literacies for Students: Part 1 Reading Literacy

Posted on November 23, 2017 by Barbara Paciotti

When we become a School Librarian we don’t stop being a Teacher, in fact, we take on a larger responsibility: to teach the essential Literacies that are so important in our global society. As I’ve mentioned before, our students need and deserve short, simple lessons that inculcate these multiple literacies through integration with subject area classroom activities.

Literacy is no longer just knowing how to read and write, so for every class visit to the library we need to integrate at least one literacy component with the classroom topic of study. In our complex, information-rich, culturally diverse world, students need to understand and be proficient in these Five Essential Literacies:

Reading and Writing (the original literacy)
Content-area Literacy (thinking specific to a discipline)
Information Literacy (the library curriculum)
Digital Literacy (when and how to use various technologies)
Media Literacy (published works—encompasses all other literacies)

I want to address each of these literacies in a separate blog post and offer suggestions how School Librarians might incorporate each one into lessons. With this post I begin with what is still considered the most important literacy in our modern world: reading with the associated ability to write.

WHY READING LITERACY IS IMPORTANT

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) evaluates education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in ~70 countries. In their Program for International Student Assessment Report of 2003 they state:

The single most important predictor of academic success is the amount of time students spent reading, and this is a more accurate indicator than economic or social status. Time spent reading was highly correlated to success in math and science. The keys to success lie in teaching students how to read and then have them read as much as they can.

Their 2009 PISA report refines this by stating:

Having a deep understanding of reading strategies, and using those strategies, are even stronger predictors of reading performance than whether students read widely for pleasure.

Clearly the ability to read with discernment is the key to success in school, as well as the key to all other literacies. How might we, as School Librarians, make reading a key objective in our library program?

INTEGRATE READING IN LIBRARY VISITS

From kindergarten through high school, teachers bring students to our libraries to check out books. Those visits need to be more than just a quick in-and-out… grab a book, check it out, return to classroom. We need to help students develop a true appreciation for the value of reading.

Notice I said “appreciation for the value of reading,” not ‘a love of reading’. To love reading is a hobby, just like stamp collecting or building model planes, and we can no more teach a love of reading than we can a love of any other hobby. What we can do is expose students to a wide variety of books on many topics so some will come to love reading, and some who love crafts or sports or whatever will choose books on those topics so they can learn more, and that is the true goal: helping students see that reading brings them the information they need to be successful.

Most importantly, we must give students time to find a book they’ll want to read and then give them more time to begin reading it…to make sure it’s what they want. I begin the year with a Library Orientation for English Language Arts classes focused entirely on reading. I give students plenty of time to find a book, and then we have silent sustained reading till the end of the period (we called it DEAR Time: Drop Everything And Read).

Allowing students plenty of time to choose a book and then giving them time to begin reading it allows them to become immersed in the story—they stick with it, they finish it faster, and they want to begin another book. My ELA teachers and I schedule library visits every other week for the entire school year, following the same procedure: short lesson→long book browse→longer silent reading. The biggest benefit to recurring free reading time was that our yearly State Reading Test scores moved steadily upward and remained above state averages!

Interestingly, one year we followed a district directive for ELA classes to read 5-10 minutes daily at the start of the period. Our library visits deteriorated because students became restless during long-term reading. The ELA teachers and I understood why, and when the new semester began, we went right back to DEAR time for the whole period. This convinced us how important it is to give students prolonged reading time.

3 PRACTICES TO PROMOTE READING

During Book Browse our students use my “IT IS FOR ME” mnemonic checklist to find a book. The 6g ELA teachers require it as an exit ticket for each library visit. The 7g teachers use it at the start of the year, then intermittently as students begin using the procedure automatically. By 8th grade, returning students are proficient, so teachers focus on establishing the process with newly enrolled students, who quickly adopt it.

During silent reading we have a quiet invited checkout procedure: I begin on one side of the library and invite students at 2 or 3 tables, depending on numbers, to check out. They line up single file at the circulation desk, continue to read as the line moves up, and after I check out their book they return to their seat. When each group is done, I quietly go over and invite 2 or 3 more tables for checkout. It’s an orderly process with only 8-10 students checking out at a time, and it takes maybe 10 minutes for an entire class, less than 20 minutes for a double class. (If students talk while in line, I send them back to their tables to check out after everyone else; they rarely do it again.)

My 3rd year as School Librarian I decided to eliminate overdue fines. I wrote about this in another blog post: my reasoning is that fines discourage students from reading and collecting fines is time-consuming work for us with little benefit.

Never, ever, refuse a child the opportunity to read!

BUILD READING LITERACY WITH READING STRATEGIES

While it’s important to promote independent reading, it’s even more important for School Librarians to employ reading comprehension strategies—predicting, making connections, questioning, annotating, inferring, organizing, and summarizing—during library lessons that involve reading.

ORGANIZING
I’ve written about my love for graphic organizers. They organize critical content and students learn to identify text structures by the type of graphic organizer used: classification, compare/contrast, order/sequence, cause/effect, and problem/solution.

For a set of these text structure organizers
and other organizers, take a look at
Cult of Pedagogy’s Graphic Organizer MultiPack.

SUMMARIZING
Summarizing is the most frequently missed type of question on standardized reading tests. It’s a strategy that students desperately need help with and we School Librarians can do that. I use the prior year’s student magazines and a guided worksheet for an introductory lesson on summarizing informational text. Join my email group to gain access to the worksheet and many other great products!

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Vocabulary is a common stumbling block for students when learning new content, especially some of our information literacy terminology. I often use graphic organizers to introduce new concepts, especially those that help them make connections between the new words and what they already know. Here are my two favorites:

These are just 3 types of reading strategies we can use to boost students’ comprehension of informational text. I’ve written previously about other ways to promote reading. If you haven’t read them yet, why not do it now and learn more about how you can help students develop Reading Literacy:

This is the first entry in my series of blog posts on the 5 Essential Literacies for Students. I invite readers to offer comments and suggestions about any or all of these literacies.

Read Alouds & Free Reading in the School Library

Posted on June 20, 2017 by Barbara Paciotti

School Librarians love books and tend to be prolific readers. One reason we became School Librarians was to share our joy of reading with others. Any elementary School Librarian can tell you that an effective way to ‘hook’ students into reading is to read a story aloud.

Young students never seem to tire of read-alouds, but many folks may think once students move beyond the elementary years, their fascination with read-alouds dissipates, but I can assure you that secondary students love them, too!

OLDER STUDENTS ENJOY READ-ALOUDS!

When I returned to education after a ‘mom’ hiatus I taught in an alternative high school. It was truly one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. The 15-19 year-old students in my school were “at-risk” of not graduating high school for a variety of reasons that made for poor performance in the regular classroom:

Poor reading or math skills, some as low as 2nd grade
Jobs to help support their family that kept them up late or missing days
Extended stay in a hospital for severe illness/accident or in rehab for addiction to drugs/alcohol
Lack of interest in or depression about the regular classroom, including social trauma

I learned early on that many of these kids had severely dysfunctional parents, and many never had a parent read to them as a child. One of their happiest memories was an elementary school teacher or librarian reading aloud to them. Each teacher had an Advisory of 8-10 students that met daily, so I introduced my Advisory to books my own children had enjoyed and that these students had probably never heard.

The first book I read aloud was an early Dr. Seuss book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, because I felt the theme of the story—perseverance in spite of criticism and intimidation—would inspire these kids. It was such a hit that I reread it each year to my Advisory, and even though some had heard the story before (we had our Advisory kids until they graduated) they loved hearing it again. I also read aloud other topical Dr. Seuss and Caldecott titles, almost all of which generated fascinating discussions among these high school students. That experience convinced me of the simplified presentation of complex issues through children’s books, and I continue to use them as a middle school librarian, to equal success.

READ -ALOUDS AS PART OF SCHOOL LIBRARY LESSONS

A particular middle school read-aloud success is during my 6g Multicultural Cinderella lesson. This collaborative co-taught lesson is designed to illustrate plot elements using the original Perrault Cinderella story as an exemplar. The 6g ELA Teacher introduces each plot element, and I, the School Librarian, read the associated story segment. While most students are familiar enough with Cinderella, many have never heard the original story. Though abbreviated for time, the read-aloud had students rapt with attention!

For the follow up activity students choose a multicultural Cinderella picture book on their table and, in pairs, read it to compare and contrast various cultural elements with the original story. The group discussion afterward emphasized to me that, not only do students enjoy being read to, but the combination of read-aloud and self-reading increases comprehension of concepts.

Read-alouds are particularly powerful with ESL/ELL students, who need to hear English spoken in a fluid manner to fully grasp the rhythm and flow of their new language. My Newcomer ELLs experience read-alouds for their first 3 library visits of the school year, all designed to make them comfortable with me and with using the school library.

I also read aloud every week to our lowest-reading-level SpEd students who struggle with comprehension. Their teacher tells me what they are studying that week and I choose a story to support the subject area classroom activity. This wide range of read-alouds stimulates these students to explore the subject on their own, especially since I always pull a few fiction and/or non-fiction books on the topic for them to browse and check out.

PUT FREE READING INTO LIBRARY VISITS

Our middle school ELA teachers all have classroom libraries, but they don’t compete with a good School Library. No matter how spacious a classroom, a teacher can only stock a few hundred books for her students; even a small middle school library can offer several thousand current Fiction books. My ELA teachers understand the difference, so that is why they schedule regular library visits every other week throughout the year.

We discovered that 10 minutes of reading at the start of each class period is not enough “free reading”. For students who have never had regular free reading, giving them 10 minutes a day to read is a great way to begin, but it can’t be the end goal. Ten minutes isn’t long enough to truly become engaged in a story: prolific readers want to read longer, and reluctant readers just want to get through the time, often jumping from one book to another and never finishing any of them.

To really build readers we give students a 30-minute time period to become immersed in a story. When ELA teachers bring students to the library every other week for book return/checkout I occasionally have a lesson, but it’s a very small portion of the 50-minute period. Students always have 7-10 minutes to browse for books, and then sit down to read for the rest of the class period. During the last 10-15 minutes of the period I go to a couple tables at a time, signaling students it’s their turn to check out. This orderly checkout preserves the quiet reading atmosphere.

With a longer reading time, students become involved in the stories, continue to read on their own, and finish their books faster. Some students decide after a few minutes they don’t like the book they’ve chosen, and they still have time to find a new one and get started reading it. ELA teachers also provide a 30-minute reading time in the classroom during the interim week between library visits. The success of this strategy became evident to us with improved word recognition and reading comprehension, and we raised State Reading Test Scores. Interestingly, one year our district insisted on using the first 10 minutes of ELA periods for reading, but before the end of the first semester our ELA teachers realized it was a disaster, so we abandoned it and went back to our tried-and-true method with greater success.

My experiences as a high school teacher of at-risk students and a middle school librarian has convinced me that, no matter the grade level you teach, you can engage students with the power of reading using a combination of read-alouds and free reading time!

You can find my Multicultural Cinderella lesson and my ELL 3-visit Library Orientation lesson in NoSweat Library Lessons, my TeachersPayTeachers store.

Looking Backward – No Sweat Library Lessons & Management That Works

Reflections from A Middle School Librarian

Tag Archives: readingliteracy