Home Reading Program and my first Freebie!

I don't know how some people manage to update their blogs so often. I am in awe of them!  I think I'm one of those people who need to have 29 hours in a day and 9 days in a week.  Of course I have officially decided that one of those 9 days needs to be a spa day....every week!  One can dream......

So, in our school, there is no set home reading program for Kindergarten.  We send home a VERY informal sheet that parents can fill out if they read any books to their children, but we are finding only about half of the children in each class are actually bringing the sheets back.  My collegue and I are finding it to be such a huge leap for them once they get into Grade 1 and are expected to be reading books independently every night. 

We both thought hard about this because we don't want parents to get the idea that their child must be reading books independently at this point (most of the kiddies don't even know all of their letters yet!) but we feel like we need something more.  So starting in January we are going to send home some emergent readers that we will already have practiced in class.  I am going to invite all of the parents in for an information session and help them learn how to effectively read with their child.  We are going to talk about things like doing letter hunts in books, counting how many of one particular word they can find in the book, "framing" a word with their fingers, etc....all great concepts of print strategies.  I think it will be a good idea to teach the parents all of the reading strategies we use in the classroom so that the don't just say "Sound it out!" when the child comes to a word they don't know.

Each time they read a story, the child will have to talk with parents about the book and decide which of the characters is their favourite.  I'm hoping that this will encourage some rich conversation about the book.  The parent will then record the date, book title and the favourite character.  When the reading log is returned, the children will be given a home reading certificate.
Here's hoping it works and that parents buy into it!

Here is the home reading sheet that they will be asked to fill in each month. You can grab it for FREE by clicking on the picture.  It will take you to my store.

Happy Reading!

Terra