Guest Post - Our Home Reading Challenge

 


Activity Village has a super collection of resources for making a record of home reading challenges. Shelly shares ideas for keeping a record of the books her kids have read in this guest post.

Guest Post - Our Home Reading Challenge


Our Home Reading Challenge

By Shelly

When we saw the reading challenge at our local library on a recent trip, it inspired us to do our own home reading challenge. I must confess we do not usually keep a record of what the kids have read so I thought it might be fun to do something different for a few weeks. Who knows, we may possibly even create some graphs at the end to anaylse the books read!

I had a look on the website and there are a number of great reading list pages that you could use. We liked the straight forward My Reading Books list page (you can print a colourful version or a not-so-colurful version where the lines are not multi-coloured).

My Reading Books list
My Reading Books list

And we really loved the idea of the folding reading diary.  When my kids were younger they loved these mini booklets.

My Reading Diary mini booklet from Activity Village
My Reading Diary mini booklet

But we decided to do something a little bit different.  We emptied one of our cork boards and the kids started adding the book titles to the cork board. I printed off a number of different bookmarks including these cute owl bookmarks and the valentine hearts  and as they completed a book they would write it on a bookmark and add it to the board.

Writing up his latest read on one of the bookmarks
Writing up his latest read on one of the bookmarks

It is a good idea to leave some empty bookmarks on the board so they can just take one off, write on it and pin it back up as they finish their books.

Placing the latest bookmark back on the board
Placing the latest bookmark back on the board

I also printed out these reading quote bookmarks just for fun and we added those to our board.

My kids are quite different in that my daughter loves writing - anything from stories to lists to tags, anything really! Whereas my son is not a writer but he enjoys drawing and creating all kinds of images. I suggested that he could draw a picture for the books that he reads or possibly design a book cover. He liked that idea.

He had just fininshed reading Frankenstein so we printed out this Frankenstein frame and he draw in the details.

Drawing Frankenstein
Drawing Frankenstein

We also printed out a few copies of this old book writing frame and he had a go at drawing some covers.  He is into dragon/monster books at the moment so I am guessing we are going to end up with quite a few dragon book cover pages (and yes a few of the monsters are standing on their head, as you can see on our reading book board!)

Drawing a dragon book cover
Drawing a dragon book cover

And just for a bit of an extra challenge we also had a go at this book alphabet challenge, although we changed it slightly.  We made the challenge book titles (of books that they have read in the past) and we also said if the book title started with a “The” they could ignore that and just go for the starting letter of the next word. When you think about there really are a lot of book titles that start with the word "the"!

Our book alphabet challenge in progress
Our book alphabet challenge in progress

Our reading book board

Here's another photo of our reading book board. I hope it inspires you to try your own! You can find the "So Many Books So Little Time" colouring page here.

Guest Post - Our Home Reading Challenge

This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.

You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.

 

Guest Post - Our Home Reading Challenge
Thursday, 12th August 2021

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