Motivating Young Readers

My students are participating in the summer reading program at our local library and they absolutely love tracking the number of books that they’ve read.  They are constantly asking to read books (I know, awesome!) and I am happy to oblige.  I know that this is something I want to continue throughout the school year.

For the library’s program my kiddos have to write down the title of each book that they read – which really means I have to write down the title of each book that they read. This doesn’t sound so bad, until I think about the fact that my 12 students are each reading at least four books a day. That’s a lot of time spent writing titles.

If I’m going to continue working with my students to track their reading, I need to find a way to do so that doesn’t mean so much writing on my part.  I made a reading tracker for the month of August that asks students to color in a small picture (in this case, a sailboat) each time that they read a book.  They can do this independently, and still track their progress.

I thought I’d share the August tracker with all of you to get a little feedback before creating one for each month.  These are really easy to differentiate with because prolific readers can print multiple pages per month, while students who are not quite as avid in their reading can focus on filling in one whole page.

Please click on the link to download the August Reading Tracker and let me know what you think!
August Reading Tracker

Update: I went ahead and designed a set for the entire year because i’m planning on using it in my classroom. You can check out the full set here!