Book Charts for Kids

Yesterday I posted ways to encourage kids to read during the summer. One thing I've done with mine is make a fun chart for them to keep track of the books they've read throughout the school year. I'm enclosing a slide show of some of those below. Keep in mind that our charts are usually really big, like the size of a door or a full sheet of poster board. You can make yours smaller if you just want to keep track of books your kids read over the summer. Since mine are so large, I take before and after pictures and then print them in our school yearbook. It's basically like a scrapbook page and it's a fun way to keep them forever, without taking up a lot of space.

We've done different themes -- leaves on trees, ants at a picnic, fish in the sea, dog bones, gumballs, and more. This year we did pickles in a pickle jar for Dilly, as shown in the picture above. We still have 2 weeks of school and I have a bunch of pickles to add to our jar, so it will be a little fuller when we're finished. That is a full sheet of poster board, so it will give you an idea how big the jar is. In 2006, we did paper chains, which were fun. I took some pictures of those too, but they're not included here. Nicole's chain went all the way across the room. For every book the kids read, they wrote the title on a slip of paper and added it to the chain. Whatever you decide to do, keep the shapes simple and cut them out in advance so it's easy for your kids to write on. I keep mine in some sort of container with a pen and glue stick handy. The gumballs were super easy because I used stickers for those. Our gumball machine doesn't look very full, but that's because I made it huge and the stickers were really small. This has been a fun way for my kids to keep track of the books they've read throughout the year.