Getting 20 minutes of reading in a day has been a challenge for our son, but it’s getting better little by little. At his first Parent-Teacher conference this year he proudly told his teacher “I get a bucket of rocks for reading!” After explaining to the teacher that it’s how we keep track of P’s reading minutes I felt a little better. I can just imagine the teacher thinking we lock P in his room with only a bucket of rocks to play with!
In an earlier post Growing a Reading Rock Star I wrote about his bucket of rocks. Basically, he gets a rock (he loves rocks) to put in his Reading Rock Star bucket for every 20 minutes he reads. Well, last week P finished filling his bucket with reading rocks and he’s super proud of himself. He read 840 minutes since the beginning of the school year. At the very least. We didn’t always remember to put the rocks in. That’s 14 Hours! Until we started putting rocks in the Reading Rock Star bucket he couldn’t see how much he was accomplishing. Now he can look at his bucket and see a job well done. He also gets a little reward for all his hard work, but mostly he’s just proud of himself. And I’m pretty thrilled with myself for thinking of this.
Read more about how we started using our Reading Rock Star bucket here.
Way to go! I have a reluctant reader too, in 2nd grade, and so we work on it every day 🙂 Thanks for sharing this idea.
P is in 2nd grade, too. It’s getting easier page by page…slowly, but surely 😉
What a great idea. I never had trouble getting Nathan to read but I could have used the rock reward for tooth brushing.
That’s a great idea, too. Hmmm. I wonder how many rock buckets I can get away with? 🙂