Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Google Form for a Reading Interest Survey

After reading The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild by Donalyn Miller this summer I decided to begin my year with a reading survey. Since I wasn't sure what my roster number was going to be, last year at one point it was over 60, and I'm not a good paper organizer, I decided to enter the questions into a Google form and embed the form on my school website. Next step; I opened that site on my five iPads and saved it as an icon for quick and easy access for my students. The very first day with my students was spent in the hall filling out the survey. Yes, the wireless hub is positioned right outside my classroom door but wireless does not work once I step into my room! I put in a work order to have it fixed but it was classified as a future project. So, in the hall we went. For most groups it took our whole class time for everyone to finish the survey. If they finished early they used Grammar Wonderland to work on grammar skills.

I use a Daily 5 approach in my reading room. But after my summer reading I decided to do some tweaking. My first tweak was instead of letting my students roam my whole class library to select 5-6 books I gave each student a pile of 8-10 books to look through and asked them to select two books for their book bag. Having the information from the survey plus the data from Star and IRIs I think I did a decent job of selecting those books. My confirmation came from a third grader who asked, with a huge grin, "Mrs. Isenberg, how did you know I lovvvve horses?!" I sorted the survey data by grade level, hid some rows and printed the answers that would help me with books selections.

While, I was playing around with the information I discovered Google does a summary of the data. How did I not know that? Here's a few interesting facts:



Picking up library card applications is something I've thought about each spring. This shows it would be worth my time.


Here's my favorite answer to this question:
If I could meet any literary character (for example, Jack or Annie from the Magic Tree House series), I would want to meet:
Annie because she seems more adventurous then Jack. In one book she wants to go find the tree house after Morgan had left with it on an adventure and Jack wuss telling Annie to calm down and not to worry about it but I love how Annie kinda has a wild side and just goes into the Frog Creek Woods and sees if the tree house is there and follows the clues like in GhostTown at Sundown the rabbit into the woods and there it is the magic tree house. 

Some of the students have a good ideas for what needs work.
As a reader I need to work on:
Fluinsy
Slowing down when I'm reading.
New words that are complicated
Being confiding
Thinking
Some are a little general:
My reding

Some are confident:
I don't need to work on anything
I don't have trobl

I'll be using their responses as I confer with students and we begin to set our reading goals.