Make and Take Monday - Reading Trackers

So I decided to dedicate Mondays to things you can make yourself to help in your classroom.  We're all on tight budgets right?  And we all work to find ways to make the most of the resources we have.  And I ALWAYS love when I find good ideas on line that I can easily make for my own classroom.  So my first make and take project is a reading tracker.  I've seen lots of things used over the years for kids who need a little extra help tracking the words as they are reading.  The easiest is of course a piece of paper that they hold along each row of words like the picture below.

But a few years ago I ran across this great idea and I've never looked back.  I don't know about you, but our school has boxes of old transparency plastic that no one has any use for anymore.  (Let's all take a moment and bow our heads in respect to the overhead projector.) So what I did was took some of that transparency plastic (laminating plastic would work for this too) and cut it into strips about the width of the pages in our reader.  I made them about 3 inches long.  Then I took a sharpie and drew a line along the top edge of the plastic. And that's it!

What I love about these trackers is that they don't cover up the words that are coming below.  They help the students develop more natural eye movements as they move from one line to the next, while still helping them to keep track of where they are.  My kids love to use them and always remind me when I forget to pull them out.