Daily 5: Make it Your Own

Yesterday I offered some advice about daily 5. I forgot another very important piece of advice: Make Daily 5 your own. I'm a strong believer that all teachers are different, and their teaching styles reflect this. What works from me may not work at all for you. As much as I love "The Sisters" (the D5 gurus) their model of D5 may not work for you. Make it your own! I promise you'll be a much happier teacher girl when you let go of the "right way" to do Daily 5 and find the just-right way for you!

So....As I mentioned yesterday I decided to try out a rotation system for my daily 5 block so that I can give my little budding writers some small group attention. Eventually I hope we'll move to a whole group writing workshop but right now it's a little overwhelming. So last night I did some brainstorming, and this is what I came up with: I'll break the kids into five groups (ability based), and we'll do three workstations a day. One will be a writing stations with teacher assistance (I have two teacher assistants but a parent helper could be work too!), three times a week they'll meet with me for reading, and the last work period will be either a choice (listen to reading, read to self, read to someone, word work, work on writing) or computer. Here's a look at the rotation chart I made (you can click on it to see in google docs):

 

 Will this work? I have no idea...but I'm going to dive in next week and see how it goes. I'll let you know if this idea is a winner or not. How are you making Daily 5 work in your classroom?

Happy Friday!

Jessie