We always did the reading log, it but made it up. Sometimes you read an hour one night but play with Legos the next...that translated to 1/2 hour for two nights. (We never lied about the books read...more like the time and day portions). My kids read plenty over the half hour a night I was NOT going to let a silly reading log run our life schedule if we were skipping a night.
I explained to the boys the idea of average reading time over a whole week and that we weren't lying as much as coping within the confines of the institutional regulations while still meeting the goals of getting kids to read. And the boys always tested years and years above grade level so I felt like they were lucky we were filling it out at all. So far faked reading logs have not led to a life of crime.
Precisely. We learned very early on that cyberschools were ALL about this sort of data. Preferably in web forms that accepted rather restricted character strings. LOL.
We used this approach with PE in our asthmatic child, too-- an average of 120 minutes a week does NOT necessarily mean that on those weeks when activity is restricted, that you can't "borrow" some minutes from another week when you go running 90 minutes daily. KWIM?
DD's average reading time daily at 6-10 yo was 4h+ if I'd allow it, so I never had any qualms about entering a value that "met" the benchmark that they needed to show kids meeting. Those forms weren't about kids like mine. {shrug}
