Interest Inventories for Your Readers
The beginning of the year is a great time to administer Interest Inventories with your readers. These will help you see into their lives to help you determine what they might like to read.
(This idea may sound familiar to those of you who attended our 2010 Literacy Retreat. It was part of the Boy-Friendly Classroom session and highlighted how to hook readers by knowing their interests.)
Once you know your students' interests, you've got a better chance of matching them up with texts they might like. Taking time to do Interest Inventories is an investment that will pay dividends later, especially for the struggling readers who might not think they would enjoy reading anything. With the right topic choice based on interest, you might hook every kid onto reading this year!
To help you get started, here are six Interest Inventories broken by gender and grade-level appropriateness:
