Our public elementary school requires 4th-graders to read 20 minutes a day outside of school and list what they have read each week. I understand that they want to promote reading, but it also feels like an intrusion to me. I don't object to specific homework being assigned (read a chapter from the social studies textbook) but am leery of a school's effort to change the general inclinations of a child, which is what they seem to be attempting. I doubt that instituting reading logs changes how much children read when they are older.

I am not going to pick a fight with the school over this, but I wonder what others think about mandatory reading logs.

We have them in second grade. :| We haven't filled them out in quite some time. Last year at the end of the year we backdated by filling in a partial list of titles he'd read, and his teacher said that was fine.

I think they're an attempt to gently encourage reading more at home, through a sort of nagging transferral process. Another purpose might be to simply keep tabs on someone's comfortable reading level. I see the negative intrusion as attempting to enlist the parent to force the child to read. I suppose it might work some of the time to get children reading a slight bit more, but it certainly won't encourage a love of reading or substantially impact fluency or comprehension. It's just too little extra practice.

I wouldn't like it, because in DD's case, it's a cure looking for a disease.

Do they not have a school reading book, then, i.e. a book chosen from the school library? Either way I would interpret this as 20 mandatory minutes daily of reading homework, and encourage my DC to have a "school log reading book" and write down that as what was read each day, ignoring anything else s/he might read. I agree, extra reading for leisure is not their business, and they're probably only trying to check that some reading is going on. (In any case, my DS is one of those who leaves books scattered round the house and reads them in parallel, so it would be impossible to record in any sensible way!)

DS is in P4 which I guess is roughly 3rd grade, and the system is supposed to be that we listen to him read aloud and sign his book when we do. Each signature gets him a "Keen Reader Point". Last term he had the fewest but one of these in his class! Fortunately his teacher understands the situation. (He does sometimes read aloud and get one - reading aloud is a fine performance skill, after all - but in his case it doesn't have much to do with his ability to read and it isn't something I'm going to add to the list of things that should be done daily.) Come to think of it he also came home with a reading log booklet at the end of last term that seems to list only the books he read at school and kept there. I don't know if other children carry books back and forth between home and school. Maybe they do, and those are the books they read aloud to get their KRPs.

I recognize that my kid is not the target of these assignments.

For the reading logs I've encountered, the kid has free reign on what they read. Reading 20 minutes builds endurance and reading vocabulary. For a kid like mine, it's an excellent exercise to get my initials daily and to keep track of her daily responsibilities for school.

Bostonian, there a lot of kids who won't do it or will make it up, there are kids who will read anyways, and there are kids that are reading -- an additional hour and 40 minutes a week -- that they wouldn't otherwise read. That time adds up over the years.

I was one of those kids who didn't read voluntarily until 7th grade. Such logs served me quite well.

Our school has required reading logs since K, and DS8 is now in 3rd. I also have one just starting K. In K, they want 15 minutes daily of either a parent reading to the child or the child reading with supervision. The amount of reading time required has grown to 30 minutes over the years, now with fiction and non-fiction book reports due each month.

In our school it is mostly to make students and parents aware of how much reading is going on and to encourage more of it. The parents are required to sign the log, and at the end of each month the students who have every day filled out get a coupon for a free personal size pizza from Pizza Hut. My kids like to save up their coupons and "treat" the family to dinner every few months.

I also really like being able to look back and see what the older son has read over the years, and will probably hold on to it for quite some time. If nothing else, when we move this summer to a new school district it will help to illustrate his reading habits/abilities to a new group of educators.

Hah! Reading aloud is the primary method of measuring a child's reading level at my son's elementary school! This is how he's coded in their books as having a 3rd grade reading level, while reading books at home with a lexile score of 1000+.

We have to do this, except that DD is required to read aloud. I have mixed feelings. I think reading aloud is excellent for her, in that I can hear when she doesn't know a word, and we can discuss it. However, she finds it a burden to read aloud, since her silent reading is obviously much faster, and it feels like a chore. I wouldn't mind if it were just a log of silent reading. DD always reads at least that much every day anyway.

Ditto- I think the teacher is trying to make sure that the child is reading at home. I think ALOT of kids do zero reading at home that isn't forced on them. I don't see that the teacher is trying to control what they read or anything.
My first grader is doing the little reading contest at school. He is reading 3 books or chapters in books daily, for 4 months, to get to the target of 400. The books are at (or in his case, 1-2 grade levels above) the child's grade level.
For him, he's reading 30-45 minutes a day. He's a reluctant reader but... He wants to read silently and we are starting to have him do that since he's reading so well!

A teacher once pointed out to us that kids tend to skip words and miss things up until a certain age (I think it was 9 or 10). This was why she encouraged us to have our kids read aloud. My kids definitely skipped words, etc.