Ahhh reading response. I don’t know about you, but I have always had a love/hate relationship with it. It is often cited as a way to hold students “accountable” for reading or as an additional way to keep students busy when reading.
As I mentioned in the blog post entitled Keeping Kids Accountable During Independent Reading, my favorite way to instill accountability during reading is to create a culture of reading. What that means is if we are going to put reading response opportunities in front of our students then it needs to be for the right reasons.
The number one reason not to use reading response opportunities: to keep students busy during reading time. Why? You may ask. Because reading time should be for reading.
Here are some reasons to utilize reading response opportunities:
To help students clarify their thinking
To help students identify and express opinions
To deepen their understanding of the text
To help students be a part of a reading community
To share books with one another
Another reason I have hated reading response activities in the past is because I often scoured TPT for the activities, did a brief introduction of said activities and then hoisted these in front of my students only to be sadly disappointed by what they turned in to me not long after getting the paper.
In other words they just put stuff on the paper and it was really all my fault. Although I often used and implemented the I do, We do, You do model in my direct teaching lessons I did not fully utilize it when it came to reading response. That was on me, not my students.
I realized that I had to give my students opportunities to engage in reading response opportunities in an authentic way, teach them how (model it), give them no risk opportunities to practice, give them a chance to get proficient and finally hold them accountable for their responses.
I have used this procedure when using several forms of reading response in my classrooms. I have used letter writing, book talk projects, choice boards and menus. I have also given students opportunities to respond to our read-aloud via opinion writing and summary writing. My students have also had the opportunity to respond to their guided reading text via demonstrating proficiency on a skill I had taught in my mini lesson and had retaught during guided reading.
Let’s talk about how to roll out a reading response choice board the right way:
First introduce a skill such as identifying character traits to students. Then introduce a strategy to help them execute that skill. Finally practice using text and an exit ticket.
After practicing responding using this exit ticket as a class, and in guided reading it would become an option for them to use during their independent reading time. This ensures that they know the purpose for this option of reading response, they know how to respond, and they know what is expected.
In addition you want to teach students how to know that their response does in fact meet your classroom community’s standard of excellence. You can do this by creating a checklist that students use to ensure that they have everything they need to get the most out of their reading response.
Notice how I phrased that. The goal is for them to get something out of interacting with their book and this reading response opportunity.
Remember our reasons for using reading response which were:
To help students clarify their thinking
To help students identify and express opinions
To deepen their understanding of the text
To help students be a part of a reading community
To share books with one another
Notice that getting a good grade is not on that list. You can in fact take a grade via a rubric that you share with students in advance, but the grade is not the goal. The ultimate goal is to help them deepen their interaction with the book they’ve chosen to read and learn how to respond in writing.
At this point you may be thinking this is a great idea Eva, but ain’t nobody got time to do all of that. If this is you, I got you. I have created these choice boards for you. I have them for fiction, nonfiction, argumentative text and poetry. I have provided you with a suggested roll out plan in each choice board product as well as a single page document for you to model it with students, a document to use for your formative assessments and various 3, 6 and 9 choice board options. Not only that, I have included it in google slides and jamboard.
Next Steps: Grab my reading response choice board bundle and apply the steps mentioned above to roll them out to your class. Your mini lesson is the perfect place to integrate these steps. Be sure to sign up for my Mini Lesson Revamp Bootcamp Coaching Program waitlist, you’ll be the first to find out when registration opens again.
