"Bookworm Journal: A Reading Log for Kids... and Their Parents"

Here's a book I thought some of my friends who are parents might be interested in, especially with school being done (or almost done) and people looking for something fun to help their kids keep reading during the summer.  

I bought the Bookworm Journal from Amazon last year to help encourage Sarah as she learned to read.  We used it all through first grade, about once a week.  She would read a book aloud with me, later on to me, and we'd fill out the journal together.  Sam thought it looked fun and asked for one too, so I got him his own to use for book reports.

Every page has a little tear-off corner at the bottom that says something cute about books.  You finish the entry for a book, you tear off the corner, and you can see the bookworm chomp his way through the journal.

It starts out with a little question-and-answer section, a page for info about the reader, and then a page for info you make up about the bookworm.  Here's what Sarah answered for hers:

That's my handwriting above, not hers, but she drew the picture.

Here's how Sam filled out the pages about his reading habits.  I made him use cursive in his book because I have a hard time getting him to practice his cursive, so this was a fun thing for him to practice in instead of just copying words in a workbook.

Here's one of Sam's reviews.  You can see that for each book, you get a page to fill out about the book, and then a page of something creative.  Sometimes it's drawing, like this one:

Sometimes it asks you to list new words you encountered in the book, or explain who your favorite character was in it, or put down your ideas for what happens next after the book you read, like here:

They even provide a couple of sturdy bookmarks at the back:

We're all done with school, but I'll be using these journals again this fall to help encourage both Sam and Sarah to think about what they read, not just passively let the words flow in and out of their brains.