Reader Response
After your child has finished part of a book or an entire book, it’s helpful if you give them some options for responding to text. This can all be done orally (talking to you, chatting with a friend, telling grandma about what she’s read); OR you might choose to turn this into an opportunity to write or draw. In the same way that building reading fluency is important, it’s really key that kids write every day in order to build their writing fluency. See the section on writing for more on that!
The key for reader response is that you’re giving your child an opportunity to reflect on what they just read. You could provide a journal for them to write in daily. On the inside cover, you could provide some optional sentence starters such as:
- My favorite part of the book was...
- My least favorite part was….
- The character who surprised me was….
- This story reminds me of _______ because……….
- The title of the book was appropriate/not appropriate because……
- While I was reading today, I thought about ___________ because…….
Note: These responses would vary based on your child’s age.
For more on Reader Response, see Five Minute Reading Responses from Scholastic.
