Taken from a painting of Kapiti Island at Sunset.
by Sonia Savage.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Daily Five 6 Weeks In.

We have now almost completed six weeks in our new school year and Daily Five is up and running.  We have Read to Self, Writing, Working with Words and Listening all operating.  I haven't reintroduced Read to Someone and may not this term.

I have managed to organise my conferring a little better this year. Signalling who I am going to see listed on the whiteboard has been helpful.  I am note keeping using Evernote.  I have given up using the table form I set up at the beginning of the year as it moves around too much.  So I just keep a plain page - dating each conference and adding notes. Each student has a notebook and I have a Reading Conference page for each.  It is working well, I find it suits me better to jot down a few words as I work using pencil and paper and then I  spend 5 minutes at the end of a session putting them into Evernote.  I keep watching out for the Penseive app from the Two Sisters!

I have also introduced the students to writing a letter response to me about their reading.  I have assigned them a day on which to hand these up.  As yet they are in their initial stages and still need encouragement to share their thinking. I am finding it a challenge to make the time to reply to each.  I think it will take us awhile to develop this aspect.  I was just thinking I need to model it again and wondering where I will steal the time to do so.  Then I remembered a book review I read yesterday on Zita the Space Girl that I think might suffice for now.

CAFE has been introduced and we are exploring expanding vocabulary.  I am finding that students are needing some strong encouragement in this area.  Having noted the Vocab board in the Two Sisters newsletter a few weeks ago I have set up a similar board.  We worked on a word taken from the book I am reading aloud.  We had some fun today using it in our oral vocabulary.  I have just read an article in the March Reading Teacher on vocabulary which has been helpful.  I have heaps more that I can read so I must explore this area more.  I want the students to grow their interest in words while they are working independently.

A video of our session today.  As we walked down to the local library we only managed one session today. The visit to the library once a fortnight gives us access to some wonderful books and we thoroughly enjoy going there.  I was able to take out Zita the Spacegirl to add to my reading pile.

You will notice we have a long narrow room with spaces that work well. Love it.


2 comments:

  1. Wow, wow and more wow! Great to see students so engaged. Love the nooks and crannies in the room...makes it feel less school like. I too am awaiting the sisters app and hoping it will be the digital note taking answer!
    Congratulations on such a great start to the year. We are at Week 6 as well and going strong here in Sydney. We are just getting to Read to Someome and finding the students are just loving that addition. We are yet to get to Listen to Reading. We've really made an effort to go slow and make sure behaviours are established. We are only just getting up to introducing choice.
    Really great to see D5 being used with older students. It's just as relevant in that age bracket. Love your black basket tubs!
    Thanks for your reflections!
    Debbie

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  2. Debbie
    Thank you for taking tome to comment. Yes I think Daily Five works really well for older students.

    Yes I hope the sisters don't feel too pressured. by our expectations.
    I agree going slow is important, I am lucky in that many of the students were with me last year, but the 6-7 new ones picked it up quite well.
    Kathryn

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