Home Reading Journals

I just have to say something about the Home Reading Journals we read about in Creating Welcoming Schools (Allen 2007). This could be such a powerful tool for both fostering ongoing communication with families and developing literacy skills in your students. The idea comes from Betty Shockley and Barbara Michaelove, who teach first and second grade, and is just one piece of what they do to connect school to families and to encourage literacy. Each day, students select a book to take home and read with their parents. It can be a book the student reads to a parent or one the parent reads to the child. Then either the parents model how to respond to the story by writing their thinking in the journal, or the students do it. Some families even used the journals to reflect on their student’s learning, giving the teacher another window into the student’s progress. The guidelines were open-ended and instructed parents to enjoy this time with their child and it seemed that both parents and students came to take pleasure in the task. The teachers made sure to honor the time families spent on this assignment by responding every entry with at least a quick note, and the “journals often became a site of collaborative literacy support” (p. 110). What a great idea!