This book has really got me excited about teaching reading next year. I have been doing quite a bit of reflecting about this past year teaching 4th grade. I was really happy with how I taught math, but not so happy with reading and writing. I had 78% passing in both on our state test, the STAAR test. I know I can teach better so that
all my students can be successful.

So I decided I needed to do guided reading groups. I am familiar with guided reading because I taught two years of 2nd grade. I moved to 4th last year and most 4th grade classes do not use guided reading, so I didn't either. I was really just going with the flow and keeping my head above water. That did not equal the best teaching practice... :(
I did my best to integrate technology and make things interesting, but I found myself doing way too many reading passages. I know that students in my Title 1 school need lots of repetition, but I think they need authentic reading experiences more. Now that I have a year under my belt, I feel ready and able to make some changes.
So I decided to look around the internet and see what other 4th grade teachers are doing for guided reading. I read some great blogs and saw some great pins, but then I remembered the difficult part of guided reading. What should I have the other kids doing? That is the big question, right?

I had heard about the Daily 5, but I hadn't read it yet. Last summer I read the Cafe book and really liked it. I didn't implement any of it though. :(
Ok. So. This is a work in progress. I am going to be figuring out how to make this work for me all summer, and I won't be able to solidify anything until I know our school schedule. I am not going to let that keep me from planning, though! (You know me... Plan! Plan! Plan!)
I do know that I will be tweaking the Daily 5 to the Daily 4. I will choose for them for several weeks, but I do want them to ultimately choose their Daily 4 just like the sisters advocate in their book.
You can see some of my ideas for our Daily 4. We will be using our iPads! Students have access to Play-a-way devices from the library, so I am going to check those out for our listen to reading. My 4th graders really need to work on fluency, so I don't want to leave that component out. I have a large personal library that they will choose books from weekly. When I was teaching 2nd grade, I had a schedule for kids to choose books and it worked wonderfully. I am going to get that going again. (I will post about that later.) We also check out books from our school library once a week, so they will have those 4-5 books as well. On top of those resources, they will be able to download digital books and audio books from our district's digital library. They are going to have access to all kinds of reading resources!!!
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Choosing a good fit book strategy from The Daily 5 |
I am going to do my best to keep things simple. I struggled this past year with setting up guided reading because I wanted to control where and what the kids were doing the entire time. That hurdle kept me from doing it. I want to teach my kids independence! That is such a big component of the Daily 5. Did I mention that I read the book in a matter of hours? I was engrossed! Such simple concepts that have an enormous impact. Love it.
Our 4th grade team has a Title 1 teacher, the fabulous Linda, who comes around and helps us every day. I am going to set things up so we can both be working with small groups or individual kids during my Daily 4. I know that the group we are getting next year has quite a few struggling readers, so I want to jump on that right away and give them all the personalized help and encouragement they need.
I have so many ideas!!! I will be posting all summer and laying out all my ideas and plans. Sorry if this is kind of jumpy. Things are coming together in my mind, but there are still gaps in my plan. I am also working on a list of books that we will be reading as a class. I am pretty sure we are going to start with The One and Only Ivan. It is an easy, short chapter book with a great message. I think it will be a great way to ease them into reading chapter books. Really reading chapter books, not just flipping through and reading a few pages.
This post makes me happy, because it means that my reading instruction is changing for the better!
Do you use the Daily 5? How? What would you recommend?