I love giving my students class time to read their own books independently, but over the last few years, I noticed that students were not making the most of this valuable reading time. They might take a book from my shelf, leaf through it for a few minutes, and leave it on their desk when class dismissed, or they might hold a book open in front of them while daydreaming about lunch. This year, I started using notebook reading logs (or running reading logs) to keep my students accountable--but al