We have been working on establishing routines. One of these is Daily 5. Daily 5 is structure to organize our language arts block. It is a system that fosters reading and writing independence to allow the teacher to work in small groups or one on one to give students differentiated instruction to meet their needs. We talk about why it is important to build stamina in reading and writing everyday. We are fortunate to have a reading aid in the classroom four days a week for 45 minutes to help with small group guided reading. We have built stamina reading independently during Read to Self for 5 minutes! The students are proud of their progress. Each day we graph how many minutes we read independently so students can visually see their progress and motivate them to improve their stamina. This week we will introduce Work on Writing. Once we have reached 15 minutes of reading stamina, we will be ready to start reading groups. Daily 5 is my favorite time of the day! I enjoy reading one on one with students and working with small groups.
