Reading Engagement Inventory

I started a new professional book, and I can already tell it is going to become one of my favorites. The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook was recommended to me by a dear friend and colleague. I’m only on page 9, and I already have to stop and put an idea into practice.

The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook takes the reader through various ways to assess your students. Later, it talks about how to plan using the results of these assessments to best meet the needs of your students. I can’t wait to read about the instructional practices. They look great at a glance.

In chapter one, Jennifer Serravallo talks about different lenses to use when assessing students’ reading. The first lens she talks about is reading engagement. She discusses using reading logs and interest inventories to help measure engagement. These are tools that are very familiar to me, and I wholeheartedly agree with her suggestions on how to use them. However, I was most excited to read about the idea of a Reading Engagement Inventory. Here is a picture of the one from the book.

Basically, you spend a block of reading time “kidwatching”, paying close attention to the behaviors you notice during silent reading. You code or make short notes about behaviors you notice.

In my version, a blank space will mean the student appears to be on task reading. Here is my inventory I plan on using next year. I will likely put it on my iPad and keep an electronic record as I am a huge fan of minimizing the amount of papers in my classroom.

If you would like to try out this form, I put it on a Google Slide. If you make a copy of the file, you should be able to edit it however you would like, including changing the codes to fit your needs. (Just go to file and click “Make a copy.) I used font size 10, and I can fit 25 names in the table. You can change the font and/or cell size if you need to fit in more names. You can either print it out or complete the form digitally. To download, click on the pink button below.