Description

Download, print and use this booklet to document early reading progress, give reading credit where it’s due (to both children and parents/carers), and help motivate and provide structure to home reading.

This 29-page A5 booklet allows up to eleven weeks (an Australian school term) of home reading to be recorded, making a clear distinction between:

1. Books a child reads. For beginners, these should contain the spelling patterns they’ve been taught. These are often called decodable books. A list of such books is here.

2. Books adults read aloud to a child. These might be stories, books about animals, the universe, or anything that interests the child, but is now too hard for them to read themselves.

Both types of reading are vital for children’s learning. Number 1. builds word identification, which in turn builds fluency, and number 2. builds comprehension and vocabulary as well as a love of reading and determination to read well.

Here’s part of one of the Reading Journal pages:

This booklet also includes brief, clear, evidence-based advice for parents/carers about how to support a child’s reading for example:

It also contains Word Journal pages where interesting vocabulary discovered while reading can be recorded and analysed:

The booklet should be printed double-sided on A4 paper, in colour if possible, with printer settings that make it possible to fold it into an A5 booklet. On my printer driver, these settings look like this:

Thanks to the entire Spelfabet team for working on this booklet, it really has been a collaborative effort.

As of 5 May 2020 this item also includes a downloadable powerpoint file that can be opened and edited in Google Classrooms (thanks to Adrianna Galioto for making this). Please note that if you open it in Powerpoint the formatting goes a bit pearshaped, but when the file is opened in Google Classrooms it should be correct.

We hope it helps document a lot of really great reading, and helps children and parents feel proud of themselves, as well as giving them something to show teachers, grandparents and others who are interested in their reading progress.