Reading Response Journals

Happy Monday! Is March flying by as fast for you as it is for us?? I wanted to write and tell you about how we have our students complete their nightly reading. Last year we decided that we were finished with having the students complete a reading log. We felt like the students were not reading like they should be. A lot of times our parents would even admit to just signing the reading log for their child with out checking to see if they had read or not! That's when we came up with the idea of doing reading journals. We have the students choose from a reading topic to write about after they have read for twenty/thirty minutes. Here is a an example of the topics that we use.

The students have to choose a different topic to write about every night. We go around and check to make sure that each child completed their reading response journal (RRJ...to the kids) in the morning. I usually take my student's journals up once a week to grade them. 

Response Questions

Reading Response Journal Questions

Here is an example of one of my student's reading journals. 

This may not work for classroom. We have found that it has really helped to improve our student's reading comprehension and writing skills. I would like to add that we did take time at  the beginning of the school year to train our students on most of the journal questions. We would pick out a journal number for them to do each night, but before the students wrote about that topic we modeled how to write about that topic. This really helps to make sure that the students understand what they are supposed to do, and what your expectations are.