Week 5A: Reading Logs

A few years ago I was on a family vacation when I asked my brother-in-law (he was in high school at that time) what exactly it was that encouraged him to do his homework.  He explained that he did the reading assignments for the classes that USED or DID SOMETHING with the content vs the classes in which the homework was to simply read in the text.  This conversation informed my future approach to reading assignments and helped me recognize that the"doing something" not only encouraged students to complete their work but also helped them better retain what they had read.  This chapter of Thompkins provided so many different strategies for the "DOING SOMETHING" with literacy. 

This chapter was also very timely as the physics teacher and I recently collaborated on a reading response log rubric (as discussed pg 112-114) that we will both use to help with consistency in encouraging the same attention and focus to non-fiction reading and expository writing. 

What I also valued about this chapter is the majority of these strategies could be easily applied to 9-12.  This chapter felt much less geared toward elementary school compared to earlier chapters from this text.