Steps to Success: Setting and Tracking 2nd Quarter Independent Reading Goals and Current Book Reading Goals

One of the struggles of trying to support independent reading in a 50 minute literacy block with guided instruction is helping student stay on track with their reading and having some measure of accountability so that we don’t come to the end of a nine week grading period without finishing a single book. While some students excel at self-monitoring their reading progress, many struggle to be intentional in their thinking about how they might go about finishing a book or how they might strive to do more than one book in a nine week period.

At the beginning of our 2nd week grading period in mid-October, we took class time to do some reflections on our progress with independent reading and to think about goals we might have for the new 2nd nine week quarter. We began by reviewing our green reading log and transferring completed AND abandoned reads over to this reading ladder graphic organizer. Students also completed the purple reading goal setting sheet and placed it in a sheet protector (provided by me) along with the reader ladder to place in their binder near the front of their notebook.

The final step was to focus on the current book a student is reading. You can watch the tutorial video I created for students who were absent here, but we used this awesome bookmark goal setting tool (and it can be customized!) to help students think about how and when they might finish a book and the steps to success to get there. We took class time to do this, and I provided students a 2nd quarter calendar and calculators to support their goal setting; I keep these tools in baskets on my desk now so that students can get them whenever they start a new book.

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Students keep these in their binder (we are using this tool, part of the bookmark purchase on TPT), and I have taken advantage of the ability to modify the bookmark to come up with a slightly different version for my students:

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Finally, I am requiring students to complete a Google Form/survey I have housed in our assignment section of Canvas every time they abandon OR complete a book so that I can better track their activity as readers. Since I have 10 Chromebooks in my classroom, computer access is never an issue for students.

We are now halfway through this grading period, so students completed a self-assessment of their goals last week. I took the Google Form responses, downloaded them, ran a Mail Merge with Word, and then printed clean copies of their responses for students to go into their binders; I also recorded their self-assessment score as a summative assessment.

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Here is a sampler of some of the data from some of my classes:

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How do you go about monitoring student independent reading? How do you help and encourage your students with goal setting for a grading period as well as for a specific book?

In my next post, I’ll share how we are doing book chats with our independent reading in Seesaw!