Encouraging a regular reading habit

The data from our reading observations has shown that there is a large chunk of our Year 7 students that are not reading regularly.

Reflecting on the Wider Reading data, we can see that there is a group of girls who are just not reading outside the wider reading sessions every fortnight. Their reading is disjointed and often they pick up a different book each week. The only book that they have finished all semester is their class set text. We know that reading competency, vocabulary range and imagination will develop if students read novels regularly.

They have sports practice, they have homework, they have production rehearsals. The excuses are endless and sometimes quite creative. Students don't understand the benefits of reading regularly and they are not willing to make the changes or sacrifices to steal 10 minutes here or 10 minutes there for their reading.

So what are we doing about it?

We have put together a 'Drop everything and read' campaign. I purposefully called it a campaign because it has a start and an end date. We are doing this in Term 3 because we now know a fair bit about our Year 7 readers, we have 6 months of reading observations about them. Now it is time to change some habits.

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So we have started off with bookmarks to launch the campaign and classroom posters encouraging them to find the 10 minutes a day to read. To steal it from the time before dinner or when waiting for a bus.

Students will use the bookmarks (hopefully) to record how many minutes they read per week and enter the data online so that we can tally up which class has read the most. Yes there is competition between the English classes, however, we are not targeting individual students even though we will have that data so that we can verify and encourage their efforts when we talk to them during the wider reading sessions in the Learning Commons.

The plan is to see how they go and encourage them along with some lolly packs and perhaps button badges if I have the time to make some.

After I presented to two of the classes this afternoon, there was a buzz and lots of questions:

1. Do I have to read?
2. Will there be chocolate?
3. What if I forget to read?
4. Can we each get chocolate?
5. Can I listen to an audio book?
6. Is there chocolate?

When exiting the classroom after presenting the ideas, a student who is a big fan of Tui Sutherland leant into me and said "I am going to knock it out of the park".

I am going to try and blog as much as I can about this project.