How to Start Reading Responses

            The reading response is a more interesting version of the book report. The goal of the response is to assess comprehension, both of the book itself and of the strategies you’ve been practicing. In my class, students submitted a reading response once a week. Each student knew which day their response was due and they worked on it during independent reading time.

You cannot expect students to write a quality response unless you spend a lot of time talking about what a quality response is. You’ll have to model, model, model. Use the book you’re reading aloud to model reading responses. Give students a list of ideas. Have them tape the idea list to the inside of a response notebook. Make a chart that outlines the properties of a good reading response. Start with something very simple, like this. Use this everyday to make a reading response from your shared reading.

Once students are comfortable with the process, build a rubric together.  You’ll need to think through the rubric before you start. What do you want to see in a great reading response? Break down the categories that make sense to the kids. For example, if you decide that a reading response should quote the text, outline what it means to use text in an advanced, intermediate and beginning response. Building a rubric together can be a huge job, and it may take several days. Here is an example rubric. 

When your rubric is complete, use it! Use it to assess the responses you’ve made together. Have students talk to each other about scoring the responses.

Once you get your students in the swing of writing responses, you’ll have to read and score them. Depending on the number of kids in your class, you could have five or six to read each day of the week. It may seem like a daunting amount of work, but it was my very favorite part of the job. I loved reading what the students were thinking about their books. It gave me a great idea about which lessons were resonating with them and what work I needed to continue. I always wrote comments in the notebooks and it became another form of dialogue between us. For some of the more reserved kids, it was a way to get to know them that I otherwise would have missed.