The Daily Five

...or as it is becoming known in my class, The Daily Three. How did I not do this sooner? This is revolutionizing my teaching and it's only been nine days!

So far we have been working at Read to Self only and our stamina has been built up to 10 minutes. We seem to have hit a small plateau, which is fine, but I am hoping that over the next few weeks we can build up more and more. We have also started Writer's Workshop in our class and have been adding ideas to our Writer's Notebook so that once we get to the point of been able to add Work on Writing to our Daily Three schedule we have ideas to write about a writing routines to draw from. The last part we will add in Word Work a few weeks down the road.

I have also introduced my students to the genre requirement that came about from my reading of The Book Whisperer this summer (see the sidebar for more posts on this great book!) and NOT ONE STUDENT complained about the idea of reading 40 books from a variety of genres. I think this is going to be a great year with my class! We have discussed the characteristics of Poetry, Realistic Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction and I really feel that just through our discussions of different genres I am already much closer with my students and know them better as individuals.

Last week I handed out my student's Literacy Journals. These are the notebooks they will use to write about their reading in, to demonstrate their knowledge of the reading strategies we will be covering in class. I have yet to decide how often I will have the students write in these journals and how often I will assessing them, instead choosing to let my class dictate my program. I do want to share our next Literacy Journal activity with you, however....

Through our mini-lessons before Read to Self my class and I have talked about choosing books and using the I PICK strategy outlined in The Daily Five. I have created these bookmarks/question sheets in order to assess my students' understanding of this strategy. I plan to have each student glue one of the strips into their Literacy Journals and answer each of their questions about the book they are currently reading. You could also laminate these and give them to the students to use as bookmarks so they have a constant reference of the strategy as well. Once I have collected their work I will be sure to post some examples so everyone can see how I used this in my class.

If you download these bookmarks/question sheets for use in your room please comment below with how you plan to use them so we can continue to pay the ideas forward!!