Printable reading log

The minutes column is the one to insist on, and the pages column is the one to be relaxed about. A page of a picture book and a page of a chapter book are not the same quantity, so a log kept in pages rewards whoever happens to be reading large type; minutes are the same minutes for everybody, and twenty of them is what a school asks for when it asks for anything. A child who has read for eleven minutes writes eleven.

The columns are as wide as what goes in them rather than a fifth of the page each. "Minutes" is three numerals wide and "What I read" has to hold a title, so an even division would print one column nobody can write in and another that is mostly empty. If two weeks is the wrong period, the row count is a control in the builder and the widths follow it.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.