Over summer, I did a lot of research on how I could have more effective reading groups. I came across several classroom blogs written by teachers who sang praises about something called "Daily 5." What is it? I wondered with piqued enthusiasm the more I came across blogs that posted about it. So I purchased the e-book and read up on it and I was set on implementing the program in my classroom.
Daily 5, in a nutshell, is a series of literacy stations that students complete throughout the language arts period that allows the teacher to work one-on-one (which is rare/impossible with class sizes as large as ours!) or in small groups with students. The stations consist of: read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, word word, and work on writing. For the past 6 weeks, the students have been working on building their "stamina" on all of these activities so that they are guaranteed to work independently thus ensuring that the teacher can work with a small group. Each day, we have 3 mini-lessons where I explicitly teach the children how to become better readers: from focusing on a specific fluency task, to working on decoding skills to build accuracy, to checking for comprehension, to tuning in to interesting vocabulary words to build up our lexicon.
Daily 5 has been such a huge success in our classroom that Mrs. Harabedian has observed several times and now we are encouraging the implementation of it in all of the classes at our school. Hopefully your children have been "showing off" their skills at home. Whether they ask for "coaching vs. time", or "check" for comprehension, or back up to re-read something that didn't make sense, they are transferring the information learned at school to their skills at home.
One of the most rewarding things for me as a teacher was overhearing some of the kids working on their vocabulary books. It wasn't Daily 5 time, but they were working in pairs reading a passage. I heard several students come across unfamiliar words and instead of their partners jumping in with the correct word, they asked, "Coaching or time?" Together they decoded the word. What a success!!
Daily 5 -- I wish I could take credit for "inventing" it -- but the two "sisters" who came up with the idea {Boushey and Moser} are geniuses. I am so thankful to have time to work with small groups while the rest of the class is 100% engaged in their independent and meaningful activities.
So ask your kids about it! See what they say :)
