free Pet Shop Reading Program

The pet shop reading program is the cutest monthly reading program for your school or classroom! The pet shop reading program is something new that we launched for our PreK-5 elementary building on Meet the Teacher night. We know that it takes a lot of daily practice to become an accurate and automatic reader. This program’s goal is to engage and motivate our students to read outside of school- both independently and with their families.

Each student in our building visited our “pet shop” of stuffed animal keychains and adopted a pet. They will read to their pet at home throughout the school year! To say it was a huge hit would be an understatement! The students LOVED adopting their very home reading pet.

Our home reading program is similar to a lot of school-wide reading programs- but it’s also different in many ways! Like many programs, students track their reading minutes on a calendar that gets turned in at the end of each month. We want to ensure the focus is on reading practice, so there is no minimum time or requirement that a student has to read each month. Students will set personal reading goals and work to reach those goals.

Another difference? Whether you read for 5 minutes a month or 500, everyone who turns a reading calendar in will get a monthly reward. The reward is an adorable little charm to add to your pet’s keychain. These little charms can be collected throughout the year. Taking away barriers such as a time requirement or requiring a certain amount of books ensures ALL students get to participate and enjoy the home reading program. It allows each student to participate based on what works for them and their families.

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In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the four steps our students took as they adopted their reading pet from our school’s pet shop! I’ll also share FREE PET SHOP PRINTABLES you can download to use in your classroom or school.

pet shop reading program supplies

You can find a complete list of photos and links for your pet shop reading program supplies in my Miss DeCarbo Amazon Storefront by clicking HERE. You can also see individual links to the materials in the list below. You’ll want to make sure you have enough pets and materials (name tags, carabiners, etc.) for each student in your class or school.

• Small stuffed pets for keychains
• Small stuffed pets – sea creatures – for keychains
• Plastic tags for pet name tags
• Pet shop background
• Label maker (optional)
• Bulk set of mini carabiners
• Small keychain charms for monthly motivators
• Small plastic pet carriers
• Small bird house
• Fish tank
• Plastic tablecloths
• White rectangle tables (2-3)

Step One: pick a Pet from the pet shop

By far, step one was the most fun! The students loved getting to choose which pet they will read to throughout the school year. Before our Meet the Teacher night, I set up our pet shop with approximately 500 stuffed pet keychains. Sorting the pets and displaying them in the pet shop was time-consuming, but important!

An organized pet shop helps the kids make choices quickly and easily as they “shop”. Sea creatures were featured in a borrowed fish tank. Birds were neatly stacked into a bird house. Zoo animals were grouped together and placed in small, plastic pet carriers. If you haven’t realized yet, our pet shop contains any and all animals in order to reach our most picky customers and clients. 😉 Below are some close-up photographs of a few animals who were available within our pet shop.

In addition to the pet shop table, I hung an adorable pet shop background along the main wall. This helped parents and families know exactly where to go to adopt their reading pet! You can see pictures of the pet shop background in the next step.

Steps two and three: Name your pet, add a keychain

After the students picked out their pet, they made their way over to Step Two: Name your pet! Students could use the label makers to give a name to their pet and add it to a plastic name tag. Many students took the name tag home and used a black sharpie marker to write their pet’s name. Either one works, but we would recommend only using the label maker if you have plenty of time to move students through the line. Our line got very busy, very quickly!

After their pets had a name, they added a mini carabiner to the stuffed pet. Now, their pet could live on a cute keychain! Our school has a rule for where our reading pets can live: 1) on your backpack 2) at home. Our students have been GREAT about following this rule. Since the pets live on their backpacks, it has not been a distraction at school.

That’s it! That is the only two places your reading pet can be. On special days or as a special reward, some of our teachers are allowing students to bring their reading pets into the classrooms to read to throughout the day. This has been wonderful because the program is truly connecting school to home literacy engagement!

Step four: adopt your reading pet

In Step 4, students simply took home an adoption certificate and a letter that explains our home reading program. In my free printables below, you can download these editable printables so that you can individualize the program according to your needs.

At the end of the month, students will turn in their reading calendars. Any student who read throughout the month at home will receive a small charm to add to their keychains. We hope this will motivate the students to keep reading throughout the year! (After all, students love to collect trinkets!)

In addition to any independent reading the student does, an adult reading a book to them counts as minutes, too! In fact, ANY reading the student does at home can count toward their reading calendar: homework, decodable passages their teacher may send home, reading a flier from school, etc. The result of our pet shop reading program? A building filed with students who are having fun and kids who are READING at home and with families!

get free pet shop Reading printables

Are you ready to begin your own pet shop reading program? You can download all of the printables we used in our own pet shop reading launch! Simply join my email list, and as a thank you, you’ll receive this download for FREE! There’s also an EXCLUSIVE COUPON page in the download to use in my Miss DeCarbo Shop! This coupon gives you 30% off your order!

Share This Post with colleagues!

Did you love this teaching idea? Share the pet shop reading program with your colleagues and friends by pinning the image below to your Pinterest board! Thank you so much for all you do to spread literacy and a love for reading to your students!