Independent Reading Response Activities: Grades 2-4

As a teacher of third graders, I love this book because it provides many directly useful projects that require students to show their comprehension skills while also having a little fun. The projects all require both writing and either drawing or construction. Skills include sequencing, story mapping, cause and effect, and other fundamental reading skills.

This is an excellent resource. My students enjoy the activities and they have improved on their responses to what they've read. I would recommend this book to any teacher that wants to add variety with students' creativity.

I really enjoy this book! I used it for small groups run by my teaching assistant. The activities are fun and the instructions are easy to follow!

The included activities are good, basic reading response worksheets. They are easy enough to use with second graders, but interesting enough to use with older elementary school children. I have even used these with fifth graders, who saw it as an easy, non-threatening way to "prove" they had read their book. The directions are clear and written in student friendly language. These make a decent independent activity as the instructions include a sample of completed work. It is possible to set this up in a way that the students can choose which activity to complete. Using the provided checklist, the students can go through the responses in whatever order they wish. This is good as it allows the students to pick the response which best fits their book. Also included are student checklists and teacher rubrics. Both of which are helpful if you want to use this book consistently. It could be used as accountability for independent reading. The responses are short enough, interesting enough, and varied enough that they do not feel like a typical book report. Although the claim is that the response activities are for any book, I found that many of them are not appropriate for expository text. The focus is on narrative books. If you have students who prefer non-fiction, many of the response activities will not be of use.

Purchased for my classroom. Children loved the books. They were at a level east for all students to read and enjoy.

This book arrived used!! There are markings all over this book from kids drawing in it from 2012!! I’m not happy at all and will be returning it!

I absolutely love this book! I use it in a first grade classroom even though its meant for higher grades. I copy a graphic organizer to the back of my student's reading logs and the kids complete them as homework with their parents. Not only does it help with the students comprehension but it also gives the parent's and idea of what questions and techniques to use while they are reading with their child! I couldn't be happier with this book!

There are lots of fresh ideas for independent reading response, by this time of year most of us have used up most of our good ideas, this supplies a few fresh ones. Can't go wrong with this series, I have a few of them in the series, teacher recommended and created...can't beat that.

My eldest child (10) absolutely HATES writing book reports of any kind, but the activities in this book make it so much fun that she is now doing extra work voluntarily! It is also perfect for our younger child (6) who is just starting to write. We are really glad we got this, it is an excellent resource for encouraging kids to both read and write.

Good ideas