How to Inspire Students to Read for Pleasure With Reading Eggs Reading Journal

The Reading Journal and The Library are two key features in Reading Eggs that celebrate your students’ reading journey and promote a strong reading for pleasure culture.

In our previous article, we highlighted eight top tips to encourage reading for pleasure in your classroom. Here’s how the Reading Journal and Library deliver on all of them.

1. It gives students the freedom to choose and take ownership

The Reading Journal is an interactive record showing all the books students have read in the Library. But it’s not just a list of books. It supports your students as they develop their reading identity.

For example, students get to choose their own Journal book covers and design their pages with decorative stickers to make their Reading Journals uniquely theirs. It also supports independent reading choices and is linked to their own Reading Eggs accounts.

2. Access to a wide variety of books

With over 3,500 levelled digital books spanning from fiction to nonfiction, there’s no shortage of books in the Reading Eggs Library. The Journal also allows them to record books outside the Library, encouraging students to read other texts.

3. Supports skills in choosing the right text

To self-select texts effectively, students need to learn how to pick the appropriate text.

The Library supports these skills with an easy-to-search function, where students learn how to pick appropriate text by filtering titles by age, topic, reading level and more. The reviews and star ratings left by other students also help to inform their choice.

You may also offer additional support by building and sharing custom book collections. The Teacher Library makes it easy for you to bookmark titles, create custom book collections and share them with your students.

4. Provides intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

The Journal supports intrinsic motivation through autonomy, personalisation and book choice.

The Book List in the Journal gives them a visual progress of their reading journey, recording all the books and words they’ve read in each month. Watch your students’ excitement grow as their list increases.

When they look back at previous months and see the evidence of their reading journey and achievements, it boosts their confidence and builds their ability to view themselves as successful readers.

5. Celebrates consistent reading

The Journal also offers extrinsic rewards in the form of virtual stickers that students can use to personalise their Journals.

When students have read for a period of consecutive days, the Journal celebrates and rewards their effort with certificates, and motivational posters. These reading milestones help you ensure that students are provided with adequate time each day to read for enjoyment.

6. Book talk and recommendations

It’s important for students to have opportunities to write their thoughts and feelings about books they’ve read in an informal discussion. The Journal encourages this through a star rating system and the option of writing a comment about each text.

This not only supports their comprehension of texts and their understanding of their own preference, it also inspires them to trust and develop their own ideas and opinions about the books they’ve read.

7. Supports reading for pleasure at home

With a Reading Eggs school account, your students can access all titles in the Library even at home. This enables them to read anywhere beyond the classroom, cementing a strong habit of reading.

You may also save your students’ Reading Journal and show it to parents, so they can see the positive links between home and school reading.

8. ‘Read to me’ audio support

One of the barriers to reading for pleasure is not being read aloud to often enough at home or in school. To reduce this, lower-levelled titles in the Library have an optional ‘Read to me’ audio feature, so students can hear new vocabulary and listen to expressive, fluent reading.

There are also over hundreds of Big Books available to use as a read-aloud resource tool in class. These can be easily found in your Teacher Toolkit. You also get book notes with teaching ideas, worksheets, and 300 printable decodable readers.

A full Reading Eggs subscription not only comes with an interactive Reading Journal and an ever-expanding Library of digital books, it also includes access to three reading programs - Reading Eggs, Reading Eggspress and Fast Phonics (a systematic synthetic phonics approach).