Literacy Workshop/Daily 5 (Freebie)

Last year I incorporated The Daily 5 into my classroom for the first time and really enjoyed the freedom of choice it gave to my students. They became such independent little workers in all areas of their studies and I think it was due to all the practice time we spent building our stamina. I am very excited to work with The Daily model in my class again this year, especially now that I am going to be teaching Grade 3. I am also planning to use all the fabulous strategies I learned during the Guided Math book study, so I can only imagine how independent and self-sufficient (fingers crossed) my little friends will be!!

This year I am moving onto a team that plans together! Yes, we already have our language and math long range plans done for the year. (And they are so pretty...all organized and on a chart!) But none of them had read or used The Daily 5 before. So I handed around my copy, got a few from our resource room and got everyone reading. That being said, a few of my team members use The Power of Retelling as the main part of their reading program. So, I got my hands on a copy and I have been reading that throughout the summer. 

The plan is a mishmash of the two models that is ultimately designed with our students in mind. Simple? Ha!

The one things that I need to wrap my head around a little more is using a Monday-Friday schedule. Come from Grade 7-8 I have always taught rotary where I have very little say about when I am teaching which subject. My students would come for 45 minutes, leave and then I would have another class for 45 minutes. My school system works on a Day 1-10 cycle so I was stuck teaching what was schedule for each day...no matter how things may have been going. Now that I teach my own class all the subjects, with very little rotary I have a lot more flexibility to play with my schedule as I see fit. So excited about that!

Here is my basic plan:

 It's a very rough outline. 

I think it's going to take a few weeks of working with the 2 models to really see how things go, and to be honest those won't even be the first weeks of school because I have to work through the launching of all the aspects of the Daily 5. Maybe November? :)

I have also decided to call my program "Literacy Workshop". I disliked using the word "daily" last year because we didn't always fit it in everyday. I also don't want a number in the title because I am hoping to incorporate a little media and a responding to reading when I can so our rotation choices will be changing and flexible as the year progresses. 

The Power of Retelling uses a "Book of the Week" approach for modelling, teaching, and assessing the students' ability to retell and respond to what they have read. My teaching partners and I have discussed that this would be a good area to incorporate the Daily 5 as we could use vocabulary words during Word Work or a specific writing prompt for Work on Writing. Really, the possibilities are endless. I can also see a lot of possibilities for extending my students' learning during our guided reading groups as I use all the wonderful strategies from our Guiding Readers Bookstudy. 

I am very excited about developing my literacy program as the year progresses. I know it will be a lot of work but I think it will be very rewarding for both myself and my students. 

The third component of my literacy program will be guided reading and using all of the wonderful strategies that I learned during the Guiding Readers Bookstudy. My one concern is finding and having enough levelled texts to use with my students. This is going to be a goal of mine as soon as I can get back into the school. I want to check out what is available. 

Lastly, will be Writer's Workshop. This is always an ongoing project for me. I'm not sure that I've ever really liked my program in the past! I'm hoping this year is better...somehow! Something else to add to my list of goals, I guess. I have always found that the program I used in the past was too cumbersome and too involved somehow. I want to parr things done and make it more simple so that more time is spent writing and less time is spent doing whatever else we did!!

So, to get ready for all these changes in my classroom I have made a few freebies that I thought some of you might enjoy as well. 

I've decided to decorate my class using a Dr. Suess theme so I purchased some backgrounds and borders that fit in with my theme for my freebies!

This first freebie is for the book of the week work I will be doing related to The Power of Teaching. It follows along the weekly plan that I laid out above and includes a header for the work to be done on each day.

The second freebie is a Daily 5 inspired set of posters and schedule cards. I've decided to add a few of my own rotations (Respond to Reading and Interact with Media) so that I can be more flexible with my program. Here's a hint of what it contains...

Enjoy!! Don't forget to leave a comment after you've downloaded the freebies.