Yup, that's what my daughter said last night about the school books she brings home every night to read and record in her reading log. Not words any parent, especially a bookworm, wants to hear!
I don't think she hates reading in general. And I don't think she hates the books she's bringing home. It's more the fact that reading them is an obligation and that she has limited choice in what to read which makes the whole thing a chore rather than a pleasure. I did tell her she could choose something else to read and we'd record it in the reading log, but rules-following-first-child that she is, she refused.
On the upside, she actually enjoys reading many of these books once we sit down with them. They always get a smiley face rather than a sad one on the reading log! It's the idea of having to read them rather than actually reading them that she hates.
That means to me that so far this is not a problem. But I hope it doesn't become one. Any advice?
I hate reading logs for my kids. I think they suck all the pleasure right out of reading!
ReplyDeleteI agree 100%. I've written one post about reading logs specifically and two others on similar topics. You can find them if you search the blog for "reading is not a sport." (Be patient - it takes a few seconds to come up.)
ReplyDeleteIt's tempting to say that there are two kinds of kids: the ones who hate the reading log and the ones who don't need it. My first grader is definitely the latter, and her teacher doesn't see the point either (in her school, more than half the kids wouldn't bring it back anyway, and many of the parents don't read or speak English). But for my older one, who is now in third grade, it's been helpful. After nearly three years of being tormented by the reading log, she's come around to the fact that she's going to have to do it (her teacher is up to requiring 30 minutes a day), so she might as well find something she likes to read. She's now plowing through the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and doing fine, and I have some confidence that she'll move on to something more, um, literary soon enough. And she's pretty proud that she's one of only about 4 kids in her class who actually does the damn thing.
ReplyDeleteWe get the 'homework' book over with early in the evening. Then at night she gets to read whatever she wants in bed. Right now it's The Magic Treehouse books, she's loving them. :)
ReplyDeleteI have just run into a similar thing with my kindergarten who LOVES books. I don't want reading to become a chore. Our approach so far is to let her choose something for me to read to her first, reinforcing the pleasure of reading. Then she is reading to me while I cook supper.
ReplyDeleteI hate reading logs, which in my house only has a detrimental effect on reading. On the other hand, I know kids helped by them (my niece only reads because of the homework requirement, but she doesn't resent it).
ReplyDeleteI ended up willing to lie all over the reading log, which I was really hesitant to do, but the school would not work with me at all. We couldn't "count ahead" -- if he read for three hours on Monday, he still needed to record 20 minutes on Tuesday. They took away his recess if his dad didn't sign his paper, something dad never figured out he was supposed to do (we're divorced). Blah blah blah. I finally talked to my son about rules to help him learn and rules that ignored individual differences, and then I started signing the whole sheet at the start of the week. And then we went back to working on teaching him to limit his reading to appropriate times, which has always been a much bigger problem than getting him to read X minutes a day.
Oh, and when he was bringing home super-dull books from school, which we were allowed to "supplement" with books at home, I'd start with the good stuff and then push in a few pages of the dull stuff in between. He was stuck with very low level books for ages because he couldn't pass DIBBLES tests; he's still horrible at phonics in seventh grade, which partially explains his horrible spelling.
Hmm, 2nd son had huge privacy concerns in 4rth grade, and ended up negotiating with his teacher to only identify time spent & genre of books he read, not titles. (They were tracking genres.) I talked him into putting down titles of books he partially read in class, since as I pointed out, the secret was out on that one.
I've added your post to my master list of anti-reading-log material here:
ReplyDeletehttp://kidfriendlyschools.blogspot.com/2010/08/join-chorus-against-reading-logs.html
Thanks! I have a few other posts on the topic. Feel free to add them as well:
ReplyDeletehttp://eveninaustraliakidlit.blogspot.com/2011/12/reading-is-not-sport-take-three.html
http://eveninaustraliakidlit.blogspot.com/2011/04/reading-is-not-sport-take-2.html
http://eveninaustraliakidlit.blogspot.com/2011/02/reading-is-not-sport.html