I was first introduced to The Daily Five book by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser when I taught in Fairfax. I was a second year teacher in grade 3 at the time and was excited to try something new.
This blog post discusses what exactly The Daily Five is, how I set it up in my classroom, and the signs I used. I prefer to make the signs with my students each year, so you will notice they are nothing fancy.
So I decided to hit the ground running and jump right into the daily five the first week of school. I explained to the students briefly all five parts of the daily five and then explained that we would be slowly learning about each one of the next 5 weeks. I started off with teaching them about Read to Self. I followed the ideas in the book and had them read for only 3-5 minutes before stopping them to join me back on the carpet. The first time I just released them to choose a spot wherever they wanted, but I discovered this didn't quite work out so well. I had students under tables, behind doors, etc. So we then had to go over appropriate places to read in the room. By the end of the week we made this chart:
Next we started Read to Someone. The kids really enjoyed reading with each other. The hard part about having them all do read to someone at the same time is that it was quite noisy in the room which bothered some kids, but I assured them that once we actually started the daily five there would only be a few pairs of students read aloud while the other students were working on other parts. By the end of the second week we had made this chart:
Next we introduced Listen to Reading. I only have 4 computers in my room that we can use as listening centers so I kept a list of the students and made sure that by the end of the week all 28 of them had gone on the computers to listen to books. Our school has a subscription to MyON which is where we go to listen to books. Before I introduced listen to reading I showed them the website and how to log on and choose books. As the four students were listening to reading I allowed the other students to choose whether they wanted to practice read to self or read to someone. I made sure that I was taking notes on the students behaviors, while monitoring the students on the computers to make sure they were not having any problems navigating the website. I found this part of the daily five was the hardest to manage because it always seems that one of the computers has a hiccup and has to be rebooted. Here is the chart we created by the end of the week:
Around the second or third week of school I introduced the students to a Writer's Notebook and Writer's Workshop (which I will talk about in a later post). I made sure to do this before introducing Work on Writing because I feel that it is important to teach the students how the writer's notebook works before giving them the choice to work in their notebook during work on writing. During the fourth week of school I introduced work on writing by explaining to students that this was their time to work on a piece of writing that they have already started, begin a new piece of writing, edit a piece of writing, or publish a piece of writing. We made this chart by the end of the week:
Lastly, we introduced Word Work. I divide my word work into three choices. The students can work with the mystery word using the magnetic letters, they can do the word sort, or they can write the room. I did a spelling inventory during this week so that I can help steer the students in the right direction when it comes to their word work choice. I will explain my word work ideas in a later post. Here is our chart:
All five of these charts are located on the wall in the back of the room so the students can see a visual to remind them of the five different parts of the daily five and what they should be doing during each part.
I truly miss teaching reading, but wanted to share my resources with you all!
Here are a few resources:
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