Want to find out if your students are reading, but not overwhelm them with reader's response activities that can be tedious for students?
Why not create a Blog for your classroom where students can post summaries of their books? The upside of this is that students can then get recommendations from their classmates on what books they believe are worth reading. Getting a recommendation from a classmate is much more motivating for a student than getting it from a teacher (no matter how hard that may be for us).
This year, I am going to try something new at our school. Instead of just a class Blog of reading reviews, we are going to form a Reading Rocks Blog for the entire school (grades 2-4 more specifically). It is my hope that this will help create an atmosphere of excitement about reading in our school.
The most important thing about this Blog is to make sure teachers are on board. Having teachers reply to students' posts will raise the excitement level tremendously.
Imagine if parents start to get involved with this, as well!
