New Year, New Reading Goals

Students returned to school this past Monday, and our first day was all about goal setting with reading. We will tackle writing goals in February since our focus will be extended writing pieces in February and March.

Quarterly Reading Goals

Our first layer of goal setting was to think about reading goals for the third quarter. Students were asked to identify:

Reflect on how many books you read 2nd quarter (students enter their completed AND abandoned books on a Google Form housed in our Canvas course LMS); I downloaded the spreadsheet to Excel and then ran a “pretty” printout using the mail merge wizard in Word. I printed these on yellow paper for the students to have and keep and to tally their reading).
Identify book titles, genres, or authors they’d like to read.
The total number of books they hope to read between now and March 11 (end of the 3rd quarter grading period).
How many books do you want to read in your moderate Lexile zone?
How many books do you want to read in your demanding Lexile zone?
What resources might you use to help you choose books and accomplish your reading goals?

Our students took a 2nd Lexile measure with the Scholastic SRI tool in December, and we can generate all kinds of reports for those assessments. I created a report that showed each student’s current Lexile and their easy, moderate, and demanding Lexile bands. I cut these into strips and gave them to the students on Monday to help them think about goals. We then put the goal setting sheet and Lexile strip into a sheet protector (provided by me) and into their notebooks, which we cleaned, refreshed, and re-organized after we completed our goal setting.

Current Book Reading Bookmark Goal

Using the same reading goal bookmark template I blogged about last semester, I modified it and printed new ones for Quarter 3 on yellow paper. Students then set a goal to finish their current independent read and how many pages to read per day. Like last semester, I keep a basket of bookmarks, current quarter calendars, and calculators.

Current Read Book Ticket

I’m not quite sure where I will put them just yet, but students are completing “Current Read” book tickets this semester. I just wanted an easy and colorful way to make our current reads visible and public. I have some ideas for using the wall outside my room, but I’m still mulling my options.

January Calendar

I always have a big picture map in my mind of how a month of instruction will look, but because of our nonfiction book clubs, I felt I really needed to pin down what we’re doing day by day for the remainder of January so that students can stay on point with their literary nonfiction/memoir book club work and for us to finish the primary club work by January 31. I tend to improvise instruction based on how students are responding, so it is often hard for me to stick to an exact planned instructional calendar, but I feel like we’ll be able to adhere to the calendar as is. We reviewed these on Tuesday earlier this week and placed in sheet protectors in the front of our course binders.