Getting Students Excited about Reading

I've been having problems getting one particular grade 4 class excited about reading when they come to the library. I tried book trailers and book talks but got a mediocre response. Either the books were too hard or I was way off on books I thought they liked. I decided to find out their reading interests.  Students filled out a reading survey that I found in the Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller. I put the survey on Google docs and shared it with the teacher.  Students filled out the survey in one 45 minute library session. I found out that I was off on their interests. Most wanted Geronimo Stilton or books on World War II. For their next library visit, I pulled 3-5 books based on their interests in the survey and handed them out. I had just received four boxes of new books so each student got a brand new book. They were excited and sharing books like I had hoped to do earlier with the book talks! Yahoo!

Summer Reading Challenge

The first ever Summer Reading Challenge 2011 was launched last spring. Congratulations to the 162 students that participated! It was great fun handing out gold certificates this September and talking to students about series or books that they enjoyed reading over the summer. We also had double the circulation check out of books over the summer because students read more.

The Reading Challenge involved students keeping track on a calendar how many minutes of reading they did each day over the summer. This fall during the month of August they turned in their calendars to the library. The goals are posted below:

Kindergarten=(10 minutes X 5 days per week) = 480 minutes; Grade 1 =(10 minutes X 5 days per week) = 480 minutes; Grade 2 =(15 minutes X 5 days per week) = 720 minutes; Grade 3 =(20 minutes X 5 days per week) = 960 minutes; Grade 4 =(30 minutes X 5 days per week) = 1440 minutes

This could be done any time of the year. You could do it for one month and challenge students to read a certain amount of books or you could make it longer and challenge them with minutes. One thing I would do differently is that we had gold, silver and bronze certificates based on percentages of books read; instead, I would just have one certificate for participation. Most completed reading for the gold certificate. One student read over 30,000 minutes!