Reading Goals

Instead of doing my traditional "where are things in the library" orientations for 3rd-5th grade this year, I decided to do a reading interest inventory and goal setting activity with them instead.

Over the summer I had been looking at reading interest inventories from Pernille Ripp's website  and Donalyn Miller's book The Book Whisperer and then with my librarian friend, Natalie Watts, combined ideas together to form one of our own.  

 So after reading Hooray for Books to them and talking about my own reading goal for the library this year (read about that here) we went through the reading interest inventory.

There were check boxes about what types of books they like to read.  What were their three favorite books?  What was the last book they read that they liked?  What was the last book they read that they didn't like?  But one question that I was most interested in was... about how many chapter books did you read from start to finish last year? And then I had the answers of  zero, 1-5, 6-10.  I explained that I wanted them to be honest and that maybe they hadn't read a chapter book last year because they only read nonfiction or graphic novels. Or maybe they hadn't found a chapter book they liked so they kept abandoning in the middle.  I had a feeling there were quite a few zeroes and I wanted to let them know that for whatever the reason I wanted them to be honest.

At the end of the inventory, I asked the students to think of a reading goal.  It could be a small, short term goal or a bigger, year long goal.  I told them to look back at their answers on this inventory to maybe get some ideas.  I gave some examples like if they checked that they only read graphic novels that maybe their goal could be to try a different genre.  Or if they did not read for pleasure at home, maybe their goal could be to read for 15 min at home for a week and see if they like it.  We did talk about being realistic and reasonable for their goal.  

Each afternoon that first week after school, I was very excited to sit down and look at these inventories.  I must admit, I was a bit disappointed, I thought I was going to find some profound answers to and revelations in them.  That I was going to finally have the answer somehow to getting our students to read for pleasure.  Most of the students set a number goal... to read 11 or 15 books.  But here are a few other goals that were set by my students...

This student had not found a book that they "loved" yet.

I liked this one so much I had to tweet and Facebook it!

And while most of the students had a goal that had SOMETHING to do with books or reading, you know there always have to be one or two of these in the bunch...

It is a goal, but...

So while I didn't solve the reading problems of the world, I realized that we are not used to setting goals for ourselves.  I did learn a lot about what kind of books my students like and don't like based on their answers.  We are going to revisit these goals in the middle of year and check our progress.  So more conversations to come.