Since I’m now able to share some of my teaching secrets I’m going to start with something that has revolutionized the way I teach reading, The Daily 5!
Click HERE to view this book on Amazon.
If you are an elementary school teacher and have not read this book and its companion, The Daily CAFE, both by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, go ahead and kick yourself now because you will after you finish them. I have lovingly placed these books on the Pedestal of Awesomeness in Ariel’s Teaching Hall of Fame, and I will forever use them with any grade I teach. I wish I had read them the first year I taught; it would’ve made things A LOT easier.
I have many things to say about the Daily 5, so I will be writing many more posts on it, but for now we’ll start with the basics. Today I’m just going to focus on the first book, The Daily 5…I’ll get to The Daily CAFE (which is my very favorite piece of the program) soon.
So, what is it?
Essentially, The Daily 5 is a framework to teach reading behaviors and independence. The actual term “Daily 5” refers to five reading rotations:
-Read to Self
-Read to Someone
-Listen to Reading
-Work on Writing
-Working with Words
I think of these rotations as suggestions, though. Boushey and Moser wrote the books as multiage teachers. I taught multiage for two years and if you know anything about it you know that textbooks are nonexistent, so the rotations suggested make total sense for that type of setting. But now that I am teaching in a single grade with very defined standards, I’ve had to tweak the rotations to suit my students’ needs (I’ll get to the specifics on how I do that in a later post).
But the rotations are not the most valuable thing about The Daily 5, in my opinion. The independence aspect is the golden ticket.
Teaching reading independence
Do you remember anything about how you learned to read? I know my generation had ’round robin’ reading as the technique of choice and all of us students were broken up into these ‘secret’ leveled groups named anything from the Coyotes to the Shining Stars to every color from the Marigolds to the Magentas. Am I right? I think they thought that we were too stupid to figure out who was the low group or high group. Well, thank God those days are over. Now reading groups have a much narrower focus, allowing every second spent in them to be meaningful, purposeful, and most importantly, powerful.
Over the years I’ve realized that children have to be explicitly taught certain behaviors that I once assumed they knew from birth. As teachers and parent we often hand children a book and expect them to go sit and read it for 20+ minutes without fidgeting, playing with their shoelaces, talking, moving, going to the bathroom, staring at the wall, picking their nose, moving, or breathing. Okay, not the moving and breathing parts, but you get me.
The Daily 5 teaches reading independence by building their stamina bit by bit over a period of about two weeks. Students first start out by brainstorming expected behaviors for reading to self both for themselves as well as the teacher. These ideas are recorded on what Boushey and Moser call “Anchor/I Charts” and displayed all year in the classroom for the students to refer back to.
Here are my charts from last year:
Notice one of my rotations is different and I am missing word work and listen to reading. I’ll explain why in my next post. 🙂
It kind of reminds me of disciplining my kid. With my four year old son it was very important that my husband and I established very specific consequences for negative behaviors early on so he knew exactly what to expect if he made a bad choice. To this day there is no question in his mind what will happen if he decides to use selective hearing when mommy is telling him to clean his room. As a result we have a pretty well behaved toddler and headache free parents.
The expected behaviors brainstormed by students are not only reviewed EVERY day in the beginning weeks of school, but they are modeled by students. Once the behaviors have been established, students begin with two 3 minute practices. The next day they progress to 5 minutes, then 7, etc until they reach the 25 minute goal.
This same process is repeated for all of the Daily 5 rotations. The hope is that as students build their stamina in these areas they become more responsible for their learning. In addition to the strands students also become familiar with choosing “Good Fit” books, which is also something that must be taught. How many kids you know only look at the covers of books at the bookstore or library? I can’t tell you how many of my beginning readers see a Harry Potter book at the very beginning of the year and pick it up thinking they can read it because they liked the movie!
The Daily 5 blocks out 6 weeks at the beginning of the school year to teach these behaviors, which sounds kind of scary as a teacher. Giving up control of curriculum guides and plans can be daunting, but I’m telling you, you will not be sorry. The AWESOME part (okay, okay…so there are a lot of awesome parts…and I like the word awesome) is that Boushey and Moser are still teachers, so they know what teachers want. In the back of the book they provide you with a 6 week, day by day outline that spells out how to introduce the program to students. It really can’t get better than that.
So if you want to learn more, I highly recommend going to Boushey and Moser’s website, The Two Sisters. There is a plethora of information there to give you a better idea of how to incorporate it into your classroom!
Happy teaching!
Leave A Reply