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.

If I have to read aloud, I skip words and miss things. I hate reading aloud.

My first grader is required to read for 30 minutes a day, and his reading log is collected weekly. The log has a section on the back to describe your favorite book this week and draw a picture of your favorite scene.

I view the daily reading requirement as worthwhile, and the reading log as a waste of time.

I hate reading aloud too. We still do SOME out-loud reading to our kids, even to the one reading Harry Potter, but I'm glad they're doing more of the reading themselves.

My DS8 has had reading logs for three years - since he started school. He also has to write about his reading weekly. If I remember correctly, there used to be a read aloud requirement where he read to us for some of the period. Now he has a read for 30 minute requirement and we have to sign off on it. I understand the point of it for kids who would not read anyway, but my DS is not one of them - he would read without the assignment (but not so much the writing part).

I have always enjoyed reading aloud to him but he prefers to read to himself now - this just changed a few months ago. We still read together at night before bed, but he reads his book while I read mine. I have actually read 5 books in the last few months.

oh the dreaded reading log...lol! Just another thing I don't miss, since we are homeschooling now. It does have a function for those who need it, but for a kid who reads so far above grade level with comprehension, etc, it's a waste of time, not to mention the agony of my poor handwriting DD trying to fit Harry Potter and the Half Blood Price into a space the size of a grain of rice, hahahaha! I hope the former teacher enjoyed looking at a month's worth of lines filled with the same title, then the next month being the next book, then...well, you get it,lol!

LOL, we had to do that this week. I told DS7 (1st grade) to write "Harry Potter #1" and make ditto marks underneath for the rest of the week.

Off topic, at what age did your kids read the later Harry Potter books?

To be fair, at back to school night our 2nd grade teacher said that the reading log was part of the district's policy of 20 minutes of reading/day, but that if we had a child you needed to nag to get their head out of their book we could skip filling it. And that is was meant as a way for kids to see if they were on track, and as a help for parents to get their kids reading by invoking teachers' authority.

We have those, too -- 15 minutes 5x weekly or 1 hour, 15 minutes for the week divided however they choose. It's like pulling teeth for DS9 to do these. He got a "U" on his report card for reading homework the first quarter because he hardly turned any of them in. He did manage to finish the book that was assigned over Christmas vacation, and passed the test on it for a reward, but he's just not into fiction and refuses to be bothered with filling out a reading log on anything else. It's one of those things where I'm torn between a "sink or swim" approach and a more hands-on approach under the assumption that it's one of his 2E "things" that takes more work.

My DS8 started the series in September when he was still 7 and finished Goblet of Fire a few weeks after his 8th birthday in November. After that one, he was afraid to go to the bathroom by himself (which is something we have dealt with off and on). He brought home Order of the Phoenix, but we made him stop. I would prefer that he wait another year to start up again and not read the final two until he is closer to 10. He was not happy about the hiatus, but he is on to Percy Jackson right now and also Lemony Snicket so successfully sidetracked.

7. He read the first three at 6, and then we made him stop and said he couldn't go on till he was at least 7. He turned up in our room at 7am on his 7th birthday, clutching Book 4 and saying that now finally he could read this. We didn't have the heart to try to slow him down again after that.

At one point DS-then-5 experienced a large increase in reading fluency, but started skipping more small words (prepositions and articles). I was worried at the time that this would be used to deny acceleration due to performance on a reading prompt, so I quickly trained him out of it. (From my phone)