Daily 5

Daily 5...What is it?

The Daily Five is based on the idea that our students need to learn independence in their own literacy development.  During the literacy block in the classroom, students need to work independently on skills while other students are involved in direct instruction with the classroom teacher.

The Daily Five activities are:

Read to Self: in order to become better readers, students must practice daily. Strategies are taught to students that help them choose"just right" books; and they learn various strategies to assist in decoding and comprehension. 

Read to Someone: reading with someone allows for reciprocal helping.  It is also very motivating for most students. The students will be taught how to discuss what they have read by checking each other for understanding during the reading. 

Listen to Reading: listening to good models of reading helps students to improve their own reading and it provides the audio support for reading that some children may be lacking. And again it is very engaging for most students.

Work on Writing: students need time to write about things that really matter to them. This could be something that a student began to write during a writing workshop time. This gives students an independent time to develop their ideas. 

Word Work: practicing phonics skills learned in class as well as spelling patterns, helps students become better spellers and writers and, also, better readers. This time can be spent in working with spelling patterns, high frequency words or working on phonetic skills learned during whole group lessons.