How Do You Manage Independent Reading Records in the Classroom?

I have all kinds of love for Donalyn Miller and her Status of the Class idea, as well as her 40-Book Challenge idea, which are both presented in The Book Whisperer, and if you haven’t read that yet, you should go do that now.

All good? Didn’t you love it? Me, too.
 
I also love Goodreads, and I wish they had a young readers feature so my fifth graders could use their reading recommendations and statistics, but I’m still waiting on that.

These tools all help readers keep track of what they’re reading. The 40-Book Challenge asks students to read 40 books during the school year. In ten months of school, that’s about a book a week.

The Goodreads challenge goes during the calendar year, allowing you to set a goal for how many books you want to complete, and showing a progress bar as you get closer to your target. It also shows you interesting stats, like your most-read authors, average book ratings, and number of pages read.

Status of the Class involves a collection of data over time to see what  students are reading – today I’m on this page of this book, last Thursday I was on this page of this book, last Tuesday I was on this page of this book, and so on. All of these give readers a pattern to observe about their reading habits and choices, which can help them use their reading time more constructively. Plus, the tracking is highly motivating for many students, especially if the writing piece is not too cumbersome.
 
So how do we track our reading during the school year without Goodreads?

Books, Rather Than Minutes

First, I want to say that I am not a fan of tracking minutes. No reader who is engrossed in a book pays attention to the clock, and they don’t read all in one sitting – they read as much as they can when they aren’t interrupted by life. This reality is difficult to accurately record in paper boxes. Avid readers frequently just guess and write down a number.

Readers who are paying attention to the clock are just waiting for mandated reading time to be over, so writing down the minutes doesn’t really serve any purpose. It proves students did an assignment, but it doesn’t foster a love of reading, and that’s what we really want – my post about access, choice, and book love talks more about this. The parent signatures on reading minutes logs, which are supposed to ensure compliance, mean little because most parents are so busy, they can barely remember to wear matching shoes, much less how many minutes their third child read last Wednesday.

So while we want students to spend time reading, keeping track of minutes isn’t my favorite way. I ask students to track completed books instead. I’ve used two different methods that work pretty well, and I’ll share with you what I like best and worst about each.

Making it Manageable - Save Time to Read

When it comes to recording completed books, I don’t want the record-keeping to get in the way of the reading. I had one student who was an exceedingly prolific reader – as many as 30 books a week – and yet writing was a huge struggle. The student recorded four books a week so that there would be a pattern to examine (even though it wasn’t a complete record). It worked, giving us some conference discussion points without being intrusive on reading time. Other students used voice to text to record their books if writing was a road block, but all students have been able to manage this system in fifth grade without any other accommodations.

What do students track?

I post a model like this in Google Classroom and near our class library

Sample Reading Record Card for Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed

Title, author and date completed

I ask students to write the following for each completed book:
Title, author, date completed, complexity, and star rating.
I also highly encourage students to record some comments about the book.
 
Title and author are pretty self-explanatory, as is date completed. I should mention that I encourage students to track their books as they go, but the first month, some inevitably forget. I don’t really care if they read the book on August 19th or 23rd, so if they forget the exact date, I just ask them to look back and give a good guess. I want them to look at overall patterns from month to month, and we count books by date completed, so if they read the whole book in August but finished the last 30 pages on September 1st, it counts as a September book.

Color Code for Complexity

Color coding reflects complexity according to each individual reader

I ask students to consider the level of complexity of books that they read, and they color code the title. If the book is not much of a challenge for that individual reader, it’s green. If the book is a just right match for that reader, it’s blue. If the book stretches that reader in some way – it has challenging vocabulary, it’s a new genre, it’s about an unfamiliar topic – it’s purple.

I keep my own reading record and point out that a lot of my books are green, because I read a lot of books written for fifth graders so that I can make great recommendations to students. Plus, there are a lot of great stories written for fifth graders!

I also share my progress through the year and notice that if I haven’t read much that’s blue or purple for me, I need to make more of an effort to stretch myself with my reading choices. Students typically handle this really well and they’re often very thoughtful when they explain why a book was purple or green for them. It allows them to communicate with their parents about how they are pushing themselves to try new types of books, too.

Star Rating System

The star ratings are useful for readers to go back and remember authors and genres they like to help select new books, and for me to get a sense of types of books to recommend to read next.

Our star rating system is like this:
1 star = not my favorite
2 stars = it was okay
3 stars = it was good
4 stars = it was great
5 stars = outstanding
 
We use half stars, too (it can be hard to commit!) and occasionally a student will rate a book 4.29998 stars, because apparently it just wasn’t great enough to be a full 4.3.

Accountability

On the Friday just after the end of each month, students turn in their reading records, and I usually ask one additional question from their independent reading – this could be about how their reading habits are going, or something related to characters, theme, figurative language, argument, or some other literary element we’ve been studying in class. I grade the response to that question, but I use the content of the reading record primarily to conference with students - to recommend new books for them, and to help them reflect about how their independent reading is going.

The Card Method

The first method of recording reading involves index cards, markers, and a ring binder. It is beautiful in its simplicity (although not in my handwriting), and the concrete weight of the cards building up over time is very satisfying to some readers. They record each book completed on an index card, and add that card to the stack.

Binder rings hold the cards together through the year. Students can decorate the cover.

We keep neon index cards at the back to record “to-read” book ideas.

The card method is great because students can grab their cards and take them to the school library to help them browse for books, and we have also used our cards to have paired and small group discussions about independent reading books.

Students often grab their cards during book talks and add titles to their “to-read” lists so they won’t forget the title if someone else got to read the book first.

Students can store their cards by wrapping the ring around a desk leg, hanging the ring from magnetic clips, keeping them in supply cubbies, or a number of other easy methods. They are lightweight and easy to turn in to the teacher for review. While the card method is not super Pinterest-y cute, it is overwhelmingly popular with students.

Card Reading Records on hooks just above our book shelves

There are a few downsides to the card method. Sometimes we run out of punched cards (that’s part of our class librarian job description), and sometimes students finish books at home and didn’t bring their cards home to update. Some students don’t keep their cards in chronological order, making it more difficult to see patterns over time. Occasionally, the cards get lost, and we don't have a backup copy with this method.
 
Side note: I have also tried a couple of other visual methods of tracking books. One year, I bought a gazillion little die-cut books and every time someone read a book, we wrote the title, author, date completed, and star rating on the die cut and posted it. It was adorable and it showed a commitment to reading as the books lined up on our wall through the year, but the die cuts were too small for some of the titles, and some of the die cuts were too dark to show the writing well, even with black marker. We couldn’t really use it to share recommendations as well as I’d hoped, because they were too hard to read. Also, we ran out of reachable space pretty quickly.
 
Another visual tracking method I tried (and ultimately let go) involved color-coding by genre. I assigned a color to each genre, put those colored papers through our school shredder, and made a paper book shelf for each student (and one for me) on our wall. Every time students finished a book, they wrote their titles on the shredded strips, so it would look like the spines of books on their shelves. The color coding by genre allowed us to see reading genre preferences and habits at a glance. It was a lot less expensive than buying all those book die-cuts, but the strips needed a lot of attention to stay flat – either several pins or a lot of sticky tack per book. Some of them fell or ripped and then it was a hassle for students to re-write them, so the management was too cumbersome for me.

The Digital Method - Google Docs

The second method of tracking completed books – one I still use - is the digital method, which I prefer, because I can access it easily any time I want to check in about a student’s independent reading. We use a simple Google Doc, and I encourage students to put books at the beginning of the year at the bottom, adding new ones on top. So August books will be at the end of the Doc, and books read in May will be first on the list at the end of the school year. This method is much easier for me to easily collect quotes from students and copy them to report cards, or to review class reading statistics. Once shared with me, it’s also safe, unlike the cards, which can get lost in backpacks or disappear at home.

Sample independent reading record in a Google Doc

With the digital method, I have to teach students not to change the font to something gigantic or choose crazy hard-to-read scripts or pale yellow text on white background, just as with any digital teaching. Other options include Google Sites and Google Slides, which are both more visually satisfying than Docs, but both also take longer to load (this can be a factor when you are checking in with 24 students each month or more, and it takes 30 - 60 seconds in between finishing one student’s work and opening the next).

Let me address two questions about tracking completed books over the school year.
 
First, aren’t there other types of texts besides books that are worthy of reading?

Absolutely. Speeches, poetry, blogs, instructional videos, Ted Talks, Twitter chats and others can all be meaningful “texts.” That reading matters and it has a place. You could certainly opt to have students record all of those types of reading, or some examples of those types of reading.

I would add that reading a book requires slightly different skills, including stamina and reflection. Responding to a political speech or a blog comment is often reflexive and quick, while the emotional feeling you get from a book can build up over time and change the way you think about an issue. As our lives become more and more fast-paced, we don’t want to lose the ability to become fully immersed in someone else’s story and “listen” to it for an extended time, weighing and considering what it means to us, or to think about perspectives which are different from our own.

Second, won’t keeping track of books completed automatically encourage kids to choose the shortest books they can find?

Not in my experience. After I introduce the 40-Book Challenge, I tell students the number isn’t that important. If they read 75 books, and some of them will, great. If they read 38 books, great. If they read 24 books this year and last year they read one book, great. It’s not really about the number.

As we go through the year and my comments and discussions with them are always about the ideas in the books and their choices of texts in terms of genre or complexity, they believe me. I tell them they can choose 100 picture books, but why would they do that instead of choosing books they really want to read? If they read a bunch of books to a younger sibling and want to count those on their reading record, they can, but most students don’t do that. They become reflective about books they choose for themselves, and their reading records reflect that.

I also take Donalyn Miller’s method and tell them that longer books count more. So if your book is 300 pages, it counts as two books. If it’s 450 pages, it counts as three books. I’m not picky – if the book is 289 pages, I’m okay with calling that two books. The number doesn’t really matter. Some students keep track of this pretty closely, and that works, because they don’t feel like their monthly total is sinking below average because they read the 7th Harry Potter book that month.

Here are our reading statistics from this past school year. You can see the difference between actual books and "doubled" or triple-counted books, but the magic of their reading, of course, won't fit in a chart - I got to see that all year through our conversations and focused attention on great books and reading habits.

I know I will continue to tweak this system, but I hope it might help some other teachers out there!

Please see my post about organizing classroom libraries for more ideas to support students with independent reading programs, and here’s to a great year of reading in your classroom!