Daily Five Book Study: The 10 Steps to Teaching and Learning Independence

So I wasn't able to get an entry up in time for Chapter 2 but I'm back for Chapter 3!

This chapter focused on the ten steps to follow to teach students how to be independent workers during Daily Five. These ten steps are quite critical because the whole purpose of Daily Five is for students to be independent learners while the teacher works with smaller group of people. If they can't be trained to be fully independent during Daily Five, then Daily Five simply won't work!

Of course, these ten steps don't just train the students in one day! It's a process in itself that takes time to develop and master. What takes the students the longest is building stamina. So in general, the first few weeks of "Daily Five" time isn't really Daily Five but simply doing 2-3 rounds of stamina building. If you go on TpT you can find tons of free stamina charts that you can use in your classroom to record your stamina progress. I've only worked with lower grades so I don't know how long it will take for the upper kids to build their stamina. However, it usually takes my class (1st and/or 2nd) around 2-3 weeks to completely build and maintain stamina for Read to Self. We would always go over the desired behaviors before practicing building stamina. Even once stamina is built, I usually still spend our first month of full-on Daily Five quickly going over our desired behaviors before we begin, just to make sure it's engrained in the students' minds. After a month in, we can usually head straight to Daily Five without needing to remind ourselves of the desired behaviors.

Step 10 mentions a group check-in. I thought this was such a great way for students to reflect on themselves and their class as a whole and that I continued doing the check-in at the end of Daily Five every day, even after we had finished building stamina. Once Daily Five is over, the students come to the carpet and show me with their thumbs how they think Daily Five went that day. (Remember, my Daily Five time is only an hour with two rotations.) The students would then give their reasoning for whatever thumb they are showing. One of my whole class rewards system is a "coin jar".

Just print and laminate so you can use it over and over again!

After we've talked about how Daily Five went, the class as a whole decides how many coins we get. Five coins is the most we can get for Daily Five, so use that as our goal as we decide. In the beginning, of course, the teacher usually makes the final decision, since students are still learning about how to correlate behavior and performance with the right number of coins. But by the time we get halfway through the year, the students are able to more accurately and honestly gauge how many coins the class should get based on their Daily Five behavior. (Just fyi, the coin jar isn't just used for Daily Five, it's used for other whole class things too.)

In conclusion, the ten steps listed in this chapter are pretty straightforward and easy to follow. As long as you are consistently following the steps every day while you practice building stamina, you will get there! TpT has plenty of free Daily Five resources to help you get started on these ten steps so definitely take advantage of that. No need to reinvent the wheel! I know it's scary to think that you might be wasting precious instructional time repeating something that may not seem like instruction, but it will totally benefit your class in the end. If spending a month of training students to be independent learners means you get nine full months to focus on your small group instruction, then I would think that one month is totally worth it!

Daily Five Book Study: How the Daily 5 Evolved

Okay friends, I will admit that my summer blogging is not off to a great start. A week of summer has gone by and I haven't blogged one bit! I actually have plenty of things to talk about, but I just can't get myself to start blogging!

But I have (hopefully) found a solution to this! I've decided to join the book study on Daily 5 (affiliate link) hosted by Primary Inspired! It just started today!

Today's focus is on Chapter 1: That Was Then, This is Now: How the Daily 5 and CAFE Have Evolved.

Daily 5 Groups

Let me start off by saying that I'm a big fan of Daily Five. I have used it for two years, at two different schools, and in different ways both times. I have read both the first and second editions of Daily Five. However, I still don't follow Daily Five the way it's structured in the books. Believe me, when I first read the first edition and saw the schedule (5 rotations in one day and mini lessons between each?!?!), I knew it would be IMPOSSIBLE to implement in my classroom. It was such a relief, when I read the second edition, to see that it was okay to stray away from 5 rotations in one day.

Read to Self

Truth? I have only done two rotations in one day. My entire Daily 5 block has ranged from 30 minutes to an hour (15 minutes to 25 minute rotations), depending on how long I have my aide for. I have found Daily 5 to be really useful for targeted small group instruction time. It is still a bit hard for me to think of it as a full structure for my entire Language Arts block. I also haven't read the CAFE book (which I really should get), so the concept of the focus lessons between rotations is still foreign to me.

Word Work

But this summer might be the perfect time to try to figure that portion out! I'm going to be teaching at a bilingual Mandarin immersion school next year. My school follows a 50-50 model which means the students receive half of their instruction in English and the other half in Mandarin. I am teaching the English only portion while my partner teaches the Mandarin portion. We switch classes halfway through the day so that the students receive instruction in both languages every day. Since I will only have each class for half the day, and some part of that half day will be for teaching math, I feel like my Language Arts block is going to be very limited compared to my past experiences. With such a limited block of time, fully following the Daily 5 structure with focus lessons in between rotations might actually work to my benefit. Now I just have to figure out how to get that part in! Hopefully reading through this book one more time will help me figure it out!

Listen to Reading materials

Join in on the book study if you're reading the book over the summer too! Can't wait to see what others have to say! :)

Daily Five Part 2

(This post is a continuation from a previous post which can be found here.)

So where were we? Oh yes, the Daily Five checklist and folder. So here is our Daily Five folder...

When you open it, it looks like this...

The pocket to the right holds the worksheets for "Work on Writing". 

The pocket to the left holds the worksheets for "Word Work".

The checklist is in the page protector in between the pockets...

March checklist

As you can see, there are three activities in each "rotation" that the students are expected to complete by the end of the month. All necessary worksheets are provided in the folders already. I also have boxes for "Work on Writing" and "Word Work" that holds any additional materials to complete their "rotation" which students bring to their table group. 

The websites are also all archived and saved on the computer desktop for easy access.

Ha, like my camera reflection? This is for April's Daily Five.

The listening center is also set up with all three books stored neatly for easy access and clean up.

Once each activity has been completed, the students cross it out on their checklist. At the end of the month, I collect all the folders, gather all the papers, staple them together to "grade", and put the new stuff in. Grading basically just means go through the papers and make sure the checklist has been marked correctly and that the activities in general have been completed correctly.

And that's basically the gist of how I do Daily Five in the classroom! Whew! I thought the first post was long, this one is definitely longer! Thanks for reading to the end! Would love some feedback if possible! :)

Daily Five

So most of us are probably around 2-3 months away from being done with school (too long or too short?)...but I thought I would share how I use Daily Five in my classroom just to provide an idea for maybe next school year?

So prior to Daily Five, I had been doing 30 minute workshop time using a "May Do" and "Must Do" list. That worked out fine and dandy and kids were learning independency and getting work done. However, I also really wanted to try out all the awesome centers I had seen on the many teacher blogs I follow. I just wanted sure how to fit it all in my already tight schedule. A former Master Teacher from my graduate program had recommended Daily Five as a way to structure my workshop time. Over the summer, I read the book and jotted ideas down as to how I could fit Daily Five into my schedule.

In the end, I came up with Daily 5+2. I don't have a picture of my board but there are basically the original Daily Five "rotations" (as I call it) plust two more: Work with Teacher and Work on Computer. Every day, table groups (assigned by color) would be assigned a rotation to do. They get 15 minutes to work on their rotation and 15 minutes to Read to Self. This way, everyone has a chance to read. I don't require them to do one or the other first, they just have to get both done by the time the two rotations are over. This month, I decided to change things up a bit and replaced "Read to Someone" with "Work on Math" to give the kids some more independent time with Math. Here's a current picture of my board with the change:

Forgive the missing sign. It's supposed to be Word Work.

So now the question is, how to incorporate centers? Well, I categorized all the centers/activities I had gathered under a specific Daily Five rotation and made a checklist that includes all the things I want them to get done. The checklist is created monthly and everything is organized in each students' Daily Five folder.

Now I don't want to make this entry TOO long so I'm going to stop here but come back tomorrow to find out more about the checklist and Daily Five folder!!! :)

Still Here! Read on for a Freebie!

Oh no! It's been a week of no blogging! I'm not neglecting my blog, I swear! This past week and this current week have been crazy. Last week was a short week with Friday off for professional development. Sat through a whole day training on how to use EnVision Math with the common core standards. Fun, fun. At least the food we got for lunch was good!

This week we have three days designated for the "as needed" conferences. So, time to prepare for those!

I'm currently working on fully implementing Daily Five into the classroom. We pretty much have Read to Self and Read to Someone down. Now to combine the two and continue introducing the other things. Today, I divided the class in half and half did Read to Self while the other half did Read to Someone. We did that for ten minutes and then I introduced a part of "Work on Writing"...sticker stories!

I learned about sticker stories last year from a parent who is also a credentialed teacher. The kids really loved it and I thought it would be a perfect activity for the kids to do when they are doing "Work on Writing". The kids really enjoyed this and they all got really creative in their work, especially in the scenes they created with their stickers. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of their work right now. But I will be sure to post some soon (next entry, maybe?)!

Tomorrow, I will introduce "Listening to Reading" to the kids. I have three personal cassette players and two personal cd players thanks to the generous donations from my parents. My eventual plan for Daily five is to have my students go through the rotations in their table groups. I have six table groups of 4 each. With such a small number in each group I thought it would be better to have the kids have their own player to use. I'm not sure how many of my kids actually know how to use a cd or cassette player given that technology has now updated to mp3 players and ipads. I searched around pinterest for directions on how to use these equipments but all the ones I found were with color-coded stickers on the buttons. I didn't want to do that because: 1) The buttons are way too tiny for stickers, 2) I think the kids should learn what those icons mean since they will see them with other things they may use. So, of course, I created my own. :)

Click on the images to see and download them. 

These can also be used for your listening center and you use any of these equipment. Of course the icons might be a little different from the equipment you use so if you need some things changed, feel free to leave a comment requesting it. Please also include the name of your equipment so that I can look it up and hopefully see what the icons on the buttons look on. 

Hopefully you like and find this useful! I'm also currently working on an animal research packet. Hopefully I will get it done within the next week or two. :X

Cheers! :)