Cafe Board and Interesting Word Collector

The second part of The Daily Five is the Cafe. This is a set of strategies that are broken into the four components of reading. (To learn more about them, check out www.thedailycafe.com/cafe)

For my Cafe board I decided to make strips that have the strategies listed on them and then once we have gone over one of the strategies we add it to the Cafe board.  Also, I use the mini-Post-It note pads and have one for each student and put their sticky note under the exact strategy they are working on rather than at the top of each column.

Here is the Cafe board in my classroom:

Here are my resources:

• PDF of Cafe Strategies
• CAFE menu headings

The Interesting Word Collector is as a word wall. Throughout the school year we will add words to this wall that we come across in reading or writing.

Here is the Interesting Word Collector in my classroom:

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The Daily Five Check-Ins

Originally when I was having the students make a decision as to which Daily 5 choice they were going to do, I would call their name and have them tell me which one they were going to do and then once all 28 kids were done I would release them to begin. Now I use this nifty creation to have the kids put their picture next to the choice they want to do and then get started right away on the activity. This process went from being 10 minutes to now taking about 3-5 minutes.

Here is a picture of the choice board: 

I used those student stickers that they give us every year and glued them on a magnet. Don't get them? You can print out their name or take a picture and print it out and then glue it on a magnet.

I allow the students to keep track of what they have chosen throughout the week because I want them to have some choice, but I also encourage them to get to all of them each week.

This presentation has some student check-in sheets, as well as, an electronic check-in that can be displayed on an interactive whiteboard:

The Daily Five Student Check-Ins

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The Daily Five

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:

• Daily 5 Posters
• Daily 5 Posters with Descriptions

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Instagram: @mrspotterstyle

Twitter: @apotter730

Jan Brett Author Study

November is one of my favorite months to teach because of Election Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. However, after Thanksgiving comes one of my favorite units to teach.  I absolutely love Jan Brett.  She is an amazing author and illustrator.  Each year I have taught I have done an author study using some of her books as a whole class project.

I take about two weeks to compete the author study and try to read one book each day.  After we have read five of the books I have my students write a summary for one of the books with their table group.  There is a graphic organizer in their packet to help organize their thoughts and then I give them chart paper and a marker to write their group's final draft.

After the summaries, I have the students do a character analysis.  They choose one character from one of the books and draw a picture of him/her in the middle.  They then write different things about the character around the outside of the picture.

The next big thing that I do is read The Mitten by Jan Brett and then read The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt and the students compare and contrast the two stories.  Once we have read both stories I allow the students to write their own mitten stories.  I cut out large mittens from construction paper and have the students decorate them as the cover to their stories.

The last thing we do is make a graph of our favorite Jan Brett books as a class.  I choose five of the books and have the students pick their favorite.

The mitten stories, summaries, and graph all go into the hallway as a display for the month of December. (I seem to have never taken a picture of this display so I will try to do that and update this post in the next few weeks.)

I have made a packet that goes with the author study that can be found by clicking here!

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Clip and Cover Activities

When making my busy boxes for my daughter I realized there were certain things I wanted her to work on with the clip and cover box. She loves the idea of using the clothespins, but she also likes using the computer or tablet to do some of the activities as well.

I decided to make my own clip and cover activities that can be used 3 ways.

1. Printable - all of my clip and cover activities can be printed on computer paper and laminated or on card stock. I recommend printing them with 4 slides per page so that it does not use up as much paper, but they could also be printed 1 or 2 per page as well. When you go to File, click on Print settings and preview, and then change where it says 1 slide per page to Handout - 4 slides per page. It prints best in landscape.

2. Digital activity - if you would like for your child/student to complete the activity and then submit it so that you can grade it, you can assign them a copy of the presentation. There is a clothespin image on the right side in the grey area that they can drag and drop to the correct match.

3. Self-checking Digital activity - this version allows your child/student to work independently on the activity. If they click on the wrong match, it will take them to a page that says oops, try again. If they click on the correct match, then it will take them to the next slide. Students should use this in Present mode, so they do not need editing access to the presentation. The one downside, is the teacher will not know what the students click on, so this would be more of a center activity where the students are just practicing.

Each activity linked below has all 3 of these version already built into the one Google Slides presentation.

I myself making more of these in the future, but I started off with ones that my daughter can use to practice for school.

1. Letter Matching

Match the uppercase letter to the lowercase letter.

2. Rhyming Words

Match the image on the right that rhymes with the larger image on the left.

3. Beginning Letter Sounds

Choose the letter that begins the word in the image.

4. Ending Letter Sounds

Choose the letter that ends the word in the image.

Click on the links above to get your free copy!

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Instagram: @mrspotterstyle

Twitter: @apotter730

Digital Graphic Organizers

Here is another great resource for reading and writing that I created out of all of the many graphic organizers in my Google Drive.

All of these graphic organizers can be used electronically by having students type in the boxes, or they can be printed out on regular 8.5 x 11 paper when you are teaching face-to-face.

This presentation includes the following graphic organizers:

This slide has hyperlinks to each of the graphic organizers so you can jump right to the one you want!

I prefer to keep my graphic organizers simple. I used icons from The Noun Project when I felt they would be helpful.

You can get the presentation with all of the graphic organizers by clicking on the Cause and Effect example above or check out my RELA Resources page.

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Digital Literature Circles

Even though I am not teaching reading this year, I am looking through many of my resources on Google Drive and thinking about how they can be adapted to fit digital learning.

This Google Presentation has two options for you to choose from. You can use the presentation for the entire book club/literature circle book. (I set up 4 meetings for this option) You can also choose to use a different presentation for each time the students meet. I have a notes page in the beginning of the presentation that tells you which slides to delete based on the option you choose that will not mess up the links.

I use 5 roles in my literature circles: Summarizer, Questioner, Illustrator, Connector, and Word Wizard.

There are slides for each role to complete before the day that students will meet. There are also slides included that explain each role in the literature circle and a few resources that may help them complete the slide.

I suggest using Zoom or Google Meet to host the literature circle meetings. One person can share their screen to project the slides that were completed as each student shares in the literature circle.

Click on one of the images above or go to my RELA Resources page to access the presentation.

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Instagram: @mrspotterstyle

Maniac Magee Project Choice Board

In my previous blog post I mentioned that my students will complete a project from the choice board after finishing the novel, Maniac Magee. All of these projects will use some type of digital tool that the students will then be able to share with others, as well as, add to their digital portfolio for the novel study.

Click on the image above to visit the choice board.

Novel Study Digital Portfolio

We may have just finished our Maniac Magee novel study at the end of Quarter 3, but after learning more about Hyperdocs a couple of weekends agos I decided I wanted to try out something new while it was all fresh in my brain.

I used Google Slides and Google Sites (among other Google Suite apps) to create a completely digital novel study for Maniac Magee using my county's reading curriculum. While it took a decent amount of time to put everything together and make sure that everything was hyperlinked to the correct link, next year when this unit comes up I will be good to go!

To set it up, I started with a Google Slides presentation. The first few slides explain how the students should set up their Google Site. The site will be used to create their digital portfolio of all of their assignments. Next, each slide in the presentation represents a different day the students will work on the novel. Each day has a set of chapters the students are to read, information they need to review or learn (usually linked to an anchor chart), sometimes an assignment for them to complete (for example, completing a graphic organizer where the students will use the text to find evidence of how two characters are similar), and then a Google Form where the students will complete their routine writing assignment for that set of chapters. The one slide has all of the directions and hyperlinks to everything the student needs. I also included a link to another Google Slide presentation that has tier 3 vocabulary for each set of chapters.

Here is an image of what a slide may look like:

The icons at the top of the slide let the students know which apps they will use each day.

At the end of the unit, the students will complete a project from the choice board:

After their project is completed and uploaded to their Google Site, then the students will have a finished digital portfolio on Google Sites that they can share with parents, grandparents, teachers, classmates, etc.. This will really allow them to take ownership and be proud of their work.

Guided Reading Tracker Using Google Forms

One thing that I have never been good at is keeping notes for my guided reading groups. I meet with my groups on a daily basis, but I just never found a way that works for me when it comes to taking notes. One year I even set up this beautiful binder full of note-taking pages and struggled to use it.

Enter this year, I decided there had to be a way I could quickly use my Chromebook to jot down information. I use my Chromebook for my lesson plans so it is sitting right there open on my table, so what could I use... Google Forms!

While I am not super excited about the spreadsheet for my responses (I need to play around with some of the add-ons), I am being very consistent on taking quick notes about who was present in the group that day, what text we read, any activities the students did, and any notes about the students.

Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up a Google Form to be used as a note taker for groups.

Guided Reading Tracker

Enjoy!