Is Daily Five for Ten to Thirteen Year Olds?

A question that I hear sometimes asked is: "Does Daily Five work with older students, for example in New Zealand at the intermediate level - Year 7 and
 8?  Eleven to thirteen year olds.

In my opinion Daily Five is highly suited to working with this age. I have only been using it now since mid 2011, and I would never go back to any other way of organising my literacy.

• It gives students choice and they love that.
• It encourages them to be independent and take some responsibility for their learning.
• Students spend time reading and writing, rather than prepared sheets etc by the teacher.
• The teacher is able to conference one on one with students or..
• Work with a group with no interference
• The engagement of students is mostly 100% all of the time. 
• It enables flexible grouping.

So if you wanted to implement it in your class where might you begin?

• Obtain and read the book The Daily Five by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser.  This step is essential.  Read it and assimilate it.  The process of setting it up is important, expect about your first month to be given over to this.  Do this part well and you are set up for a great year.

• Obtain and read their book The Cafe Book, Engaging all Students In Daily Literacy Assessment and Instruction.  Daily Five is really only the organisational structure, Cafe relates to the literacy teaching - they complement each other.

• Although not a daily five book I would also highly recommend The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, to teachers of older students. This will really fire up your own enthusiasm for children's literature and enhance your Daily Five literacy.

• Prepare and begin. Don't be overwhelmed, it may seem difficult but it really is okay once you get going.

In the beginning I taught all five aspects of Daily Five - Reading to Self, Reading to Others, Listening, Writing and Working with Words. As 2011 passed I realised that actually for older students not all five are needed. So for 2012 I have Read to Self, Writing and Working with Words.  However this does not cut out the option of listening; some students might opt in their read to self time - to listen.  As we generally have students at different levels of reading - read to others might be appropriate too as a choice.  The great thing is Daily Five is flexible.

On a good day I do three rounds and it goes like this:

• A ten minute teaching time with the whole class - in the beginning this is about process and practice of the structure of Daily Five. Later this will become input around Reading or Writing or Vocabulary.
• A breakout, where students make a choice of what they are going to do - caution this comes after you have established Reading, Writing and Words work individually.
• During the breakout time I meet individuals and conference reading around reading and writing - or take a group for a short while.
• Another ten minute gathering time - more input from the teacher.
• Another breakout
• Another ten minute input time.
• Another breakout
• Share time.

With older students breakout time is usually 25 - 30  minutes for me.  It just depends on the day.

Now not every day is a good day! (I define a good day as heaps of time for literacy!) Sometimes we only have one round or two rounds on other days.  I warn students at the beginning: today we have .... rounds. Then they can make their choice accordingly.

The two sisters Daily Five website is another place to visit.  I have a subscription to it because I find all the answers to my questions there!  I started out with a three month sub to see if it would be useful to me first. It was! Excellent video that models so many aspects.  If you don't subscribe at least sign up for the newsletter as it is great value.

Follow or/and join in with the Daily Five chat on Twitter. It goes under the hash #d5chat.  In New Zealand the chat time is on the 1st and 3rd Saturday at 1pm.  That is Friday evening in the States.

If you have a question, as you decide whether it is for you - don't hesitate to ask.

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.

Classroom Setting Up - Week One.

I have a new determination to be a little more organised with the way my classroom has items organised.  I want to do this for ease of access for myself and my students.  So at the end of week one of year we are on the way to being organised and clutter free!

As we have no personal desk space, this year I have a bucket for each student.  They can name it and carry it wherever they need to go.  They have the option of removing the handles if they want.  These were inexpensive - $2.18 each from Mitre 10.

In it they have the books they are reading, their reading notebooks and writing notebooks, pencil cases and headphones.
So far they are proving to be a very good option.

I also found exactly the same buckets but in colour at Briscoes, on sale they worked out at $1.75.
 Each of these contains exercise books for such things as Maths, Religious Education, etc.

I have containers marked with pencils, sharpeners, scissors, pens, plasters, rulers.

The students have most of these themselves but every teacher knows that sometimes they don't!

Also it is where I dip into when I need things. So we share.

Notice student bucket being used!

Here the students have decided what genre books are in the green container.  They are making a label for it and adding stickers to the front covers so that they can easily return the books to the bin when they have finished reading it.
It took us longer than I thought, however many hands make light work and it saved me a few hours.

We only have a small class library, however this will slowly be added to as time goes by.

We also access books from home, the school library, the local Kapiti library once a fortnight and the National School Library Service provides us with 30 books at a time.






All in all I am very pleased with my decluttering!  I am working at present on my desk space, which is a small desk for my computer and a small table.  I want to sort that a little more so that I can readily access what I need. Perhaps a few nails in the wall coming up?!

The Book Whisperer.

I have just finished reading this excellent book by Donalyn Miller.  I found it easy reading, and was through it in a couple of days.  However I am now intending to do a re-read and gather up what I missed in the first reading.

                                                      

 I grew up in the'50s where I was forever scrounging and seeking out books that weren't there. No town or school library, and a meager class library. Oh to have been in such a classroom as D Millers. She believes that students should have plenty of books available to them to read, and that they should be of their own choosing.  She also believes that this type of reading can be done during the school day. Now that kind of thinking is not foreign to me, New Zealand schools have long been places where we could choose the materials we teach with.  We have no prescribed basal readers or course that we have to follow. Just standards our students must reach. During my teaching career students have always chosen their own books to read in class.  This said, D Miller is advocating more than that, and that is where I found her book helpful.

I have recently become aware of the Daily Five and Café books by the sisters Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, and have implemented their ideas as well as I can. Of course as always, it was a fine tuning of my teaching rather than a radical shift, especially with the Café book.  However the Daily Five did involve some small radical changes – throwing out many desks for one!  The Book Whisperer calls for more fine tuning, and it challenges me as well.

Daily Five is working well, its magic, as all of we teachers who have implemented it can attest to.  In spite of this I still had a query in my mind as to the accountability of students in their reading.  The Book Whisperer answers this question for me.  If you are wondering about it then read the book, like me you will find answers.

I admit I have never been a great reader of children's literature, I enjoy the books I read to my class and there it stops. I now realise I need to read more of them, so I am starting with a goal of one per week. I have just grabbed from our school library Inkheart by  Cornelia Funke. D Miller mentions it in her book; also one of my reluctant girl readers mentioned it yesterday as a favourite book for her.  As this year has been a year of difficulty for me in trying to hook in some girls to reading, I thought this is a good place for me to start.

Some main points that I take from this book are:

·        The students need a wide variety of books to choose from – as each student will have differing tastes.  D Miller has her own vast class library that she has paid for.  I don’t have the time to build that library – I retire in a few years – however I have some books in our class library, we have a good school library, we visit as a class the local district library once a fortnight and we can loan 30 books from our National library for a 6 week time period. 

·        She has a very good system for organising her class books. She does this according to genre and has a system of stickers and numbers that easily allow for additional books with no changing around of the books already there.  I am going to organise the books I do have in the way she describes. It might not be until the summer break, but I will do it.

·        She has  high expectations for her students.  She sets the goal at the beginning of the year for the students to read 40 books.  Read that is! She allows that a reader will pick up a book and not like it and its okay to discard. ( I notice on Goodreads she has her own shelf for such discards.) Next term, is going to be short, I think I will set 7 -8 books for my class. In February as we begin our school year, it will be 40.

·        She has an effective system of accountability.  She has her students use a reader’s notebook and has a simple way of recording what they read.  I like this and I am going to implement it next term.  Once a week they write her a letter type response to the book they are reading and she replies to this. I need to explore that further in my second reread of the book.

·        She reads many children’s books so that she can match a student to a book.  I am sure that’s not the only reason she reads them, she is obviously a booklover full stop!  For me this is the most challenging aspect.  I am a booklover too, but prefer to read what I like in my own time.  As a result of reading this book though, I am going to change that, as I mentioned above.

I highly recommend this book to all teachers, and as one teacher on Twitter suggests, all administrators!

#Daily5 in Action

A video of my 10 to 13 year olds using the spaces made by throwing out some of the desks from the classroom.
I am really pleased with the space that has been freed up, plenty of space for individuals to spread out, and we have a large meeting area. I suspect I will never go back to a desk per student in a classroom.

Writing in the Classroom

Recently I have been working on what good writing looks like, and what the teaching of that looks like as well.  Last summer holidays,- overseas readers  its just going into Spring down here- as teachers do, I was searching around for new viewpoints on writing.  I came across the Northern Nevada Writing Project.  It has some wonderful pointers on the teaching of writing in the classroom.

It takes the six traits approach to writing, and I find this really helpful in teaching the skills of writing.  When I went to school, we didn't learn that much about writing.  Once when my mother went to a parent interview the teacher said, "You would think her writing would be better with all the reading she does".  My mother came home and repeated that to me, and it's a remark I've never forgotten. It wasn't that helpful, and if I was being myself now, I would say, "So teach me to write!"  Back then, we were expected to learn about writing by osmosis perhaps? The Northern Nevada writing project which you can link to from the picture below, features children's books that can be a model for writing.

I noted this site, but it is only recently that I have returned to it and started to really make use of it.


There is also a Ning linked to this site, which again I joined but did little about until now.  You can check it out through the picture link below.  At present I am grappling with developing the skills of sentence fluency with my class.  Another post on that later.  Let us say I am coming to terms with the participle phrase, hoping that my students are at the same time.

It is said that what we need to learn,  is best learned by teaching it.  You see, it is not only my class that are developing their writing knowledge and skills, count me in too.  At present I am preparing a guest post on books for another teacher.  I just need the time to revise and edit it first!  I want to put into practice what I am learning.  Hope my class does too.

Were you taught about writing when you went to school, or did you learn by osmosis?

Class Engaged in #Daily5.

My class have all voted in favour of the way we are managing the Literacy section of the day. I vote for it too!

Real Learning?

I am really enjoying the experience of trying out Daily Five in my classroom.  This system of structuring and managing my Literacy programme, along with the CAFE menu of reading strategies,  is a way of teaching that is really resonating with me. I feel so energised still at the end of the day, I look forward to the ideas I am going to share and teach my class each day.  Some of these things are new to me, I have just learned them and I delight in bringing them along to class.

Today I stopped by DR. He was working on a narrative piece of writing in his Writer's Notebook.  I asked him about the last piece of narrative writing he had been working on when I met him last.  He looked at me and said, "It didn't work out, I got muddled in the middle." I asked him what he had learned from the experience. He replied, " I realised I really need to plan my writing. So I am taking the time to plan this narrative in more depth, at the moment I am developing my characters so that I have some details on the kind of people they are."

Have your ever felt vindicated! (We are working at using words we come across in our reading, vindicated is one of those!) In that moment I did.  Early in the year I had taken the class through a number of ways to plan their writing.  In term two I was out of the classroom, on returning this term, as I circled the room I began to realise that as I asked about planning, many students owned that they hadn't planned.  I felt quite downhearted. However I calmly mentioned and reminded again of the importance of planning.

Now, through first hand experience DR has discovered and experienced how important planning is in helping to structure a piece of writing.  If I had continued to teach and support and gone back to Term one mode, DR would never have learned this for himself.  There's a time to teach, and there's a time to give students the freedom to find out for themselves.

It was a great day!

Ten Week Paid Sabbatical.

At the end of last week I found out I was one of the small group of fortunate teachers in New Zealand to be awarded a 10 week paid sabbatical in 2012.  Half the time is for learning and half the time is for relaxing and living a leisurely life!  I am delighted to be given the time. I really look forward to it.

                                                                   

My goal for my sabbatical is:

To investigate how I can use tools of the twenty-first century to develop in my Year 5 – 8 students, digital literacy and network literacy.

To investigate how I can do this in a way that empowers them to be intelligent and critical producers and consumers of a full range of media texts.

The questions I will investigate are:

·         How can I effectively use digital story-telling, podcasting, vodcasting, voicethread and other tools to empower my students  to be critical thinkers about what they and others produce?

·         Are there benefits to using such sites as Facebook and Twitter in a primary classroom?  What other ways are available for networking and collaborating?

·         How can I develop the reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and presenting abilities of my students through these tools?

·         How can these tools meet the diverse needs of students in our senior school?

·         How can I encourage a process and product that empowers students to engage in work that has the mark of excellence? 

I will explore:

How other teachers are already using these tools through reading about their experiences with them on their blogs and wikis and attending webinars.  I will read books and articles from teacher magazines that refer to the literacies I am exploring.

A book called, Digital Storytelling by Richard Lambert and Adam Brice to develop my ideas and learn from the experience of those who have already been very successful in the digital storytelling field.

Each tool I learn about I will ‘play’ with, developing my own skills so that I can share them with my students.

·         

Implementing Daily Five.

Three weeks into the new school term and Daily Five is beginning to take shape in my classroom.  I am still finding my way and I still have questions, however I think that when I begin to grasp the way it works and how I might operate within it, it is going to be all I hoped.

The actual design of the classroom, with many of the desks removed to the storage dungeon, on the whole is working well.  The main drawback is that I have allotted places around the room for students to store their books and pencils etc.,   at times there  are bodies all trying to get to the same place at the same time.  So we are learning about waiting and taking turns, rather than walking on top of one another, ( as one student does)!

The students like the layout, and there were many dropping jaws and visitors from the next room coming in to see what had happened in Room four, on the first day back.  Just a week ago, after school, Sandy, a teacher from the other end of our long corridor came in and exclaimed, “Where are all your desks?”   With glee, I told her what I had done with them.

I now have Reading to Self, up and running successfully. This was not difficult as the students were already reading for 20 minutes of self-choice reading in the day. However I went through the Daily Five introduction and we practiced doing it correctly, incorrectly and correctly!   Writing was next on the list and we went through the same process, followed by Working with Words. 

At present I am working on Reading to Someone.  We are at the stage of building the I chart and practising it.  By the end of the week I hope it will be there as a choice.  I am a little nervous of this one, as it will introduce more sound into the room, so I think I will need to take my time with it.  At a class level where students are 10 to 13 years old perhaps it could be argued it isn’t a needed skill. That most of them are fluent readers.  However not all of them are, and those that are, do not necessarily have the expression and variety of a good oral reader.  I will probably request that it be chosen two times in the week and observe how that goes.

Listening will be introduced this week and up and running by next week.  I am not going to make this a compulsory aspect as I think it will appeal to those it needs to, and less to those who don’t need it so much.  However I do believe we all benefit from being read to, and I won’t stop anybody from making the choice. I have used Ministry listening materials, and have also collected some other places the students might go in my Livebinder.   We have another time in the day when we all listen to a story together.  At present we are listening to The Lion Boy by Zizou Corder. 

This week I am aiming for four days using Daily Five.  Because I am giving more time than I might normally to Literacy, I am keeping Friday to cover other aspects of the curriculum.  I am giving a ten minute input, and then students choose what they are going to work on.   On a good day I hope to have four input sessions, followed by four choice sessions.  As all teachers know, not every day is a good day.  Take tomorrow there are school photos!  Tuesday the students are off to technology and so it goes…. 

The hardest aspect for me to organize I think will be how I spend that time while the students are involved in their choices.  At present I am using it to Running Record some students to find out what would be good next steps for them.  I am also meeting individually with writers, and I am beginning to grasp that.  However once I start integrating group times, it will be something else to juggle.  I want to use my time wisely and where it will make the most difference.  I suspect this aspect of Daily Five is going to take the longest to implement effectively. 

I am keen that students will be able to tell me what they are choosing to do and what their goal is as they leave the gathering place.  Some students are well able to identify their goals, others are going to need more support. 

I see how our key competency of self-management fits very well into the Daily Five.  I have completed a taxonomy for students to place themselves on at the end of each session or day, in relation to this.  Indeed I should do one for myself.  With over 35 years of teaching experience it is very difficult to leave go my roving eye and word of caution, and allow the students to practice self-management!

My Classroom is Coming Together.

Here is a video of what my classroom is beginning to look like.  Most of the desks have gone.  I decided I didn't want any student to have a tray in the desk, as I didn't want anyone to be able to claim a desk as "theirs".  I had to do some problem solving with where the students would keep their exercise books, pencil cases etc.  I am hoping my solution will work.  A classroom always feels good before the students hit, once they are there it becomes quite different.  So it will be interesting to see how we all fare in this new layout!!

So my classroom is almost set, now I need to get my planning ready to begin the Daily Five.  Here is a short video to show some of my changes, forgive the rather inane commentary.  I need to work on that.



Any suggestions you may have will be welcomed and listened to.

My LiveBinder for #Daily5.

Yesterday I spent most of the day making my first Livebinder.  I was inspired to do this when I saw Theresa's LiveBinders on her blog.  As I was on holiday I wanted to explore how they might work.  As I was reading and deciding to implement The Daily Five in my classroom I thought it would be a good supplement to my literacy programme.  I can leave it on my classroom blog as a choice for students to explore during the Daily Five.

I tried to find material that would suit my class. They are 10 to 12 year olds. I do have a wide range of ability, from one student who is under the resource teacher of literacy to students who score at the top end of the range.  At this point I didn't try to differentiate.  I remember a few years back when I was teaching another student who was working with the resource teacher of literacy.  I had him listening to various CD's and other listening and reading material provided to NZ schools for free.  After awhile the others wanted to listen in too, and set themselves up!

My next goal is to establish a class wiki.  I have signed up for one, but it may be awhile before I get to it with so much that I want to accomplish in redesigning the layout of my classroom!

#Daily Five

Redesigning the Layout of my Classroom.

It is going to be a larger task than I thought.  Before I get to the fun part I am going to need to do a major clean out.  There are things that need to be thrown to the recycling or at least placed somewhere else, so that I can make room for new needs. 

I had thought we had some tote tray storage but someone else is happily using them, so I am going to need to clear shelves so that students can keep their things there.  In fact I don’t want anyone to have the tote tray in a desk. It might make them think it is “their” desk. 

So tomorrow the big throw out begins!

Classroom Changes Afoot.

Holidays are when ideas begin to mull around in my head.  The summer holidays usually are the worst!  I make huge plans, and then I return to school, and reality hits!  It’s then I find the nitty gritty of implementing those plans takes a lot more than I anticipated in those lazy, hazy days of summer.

However, this isn’t the summer break, it’s the two week mid-winter break.  Ideas of how I want to make changes are entering my mind.  I am blaming it on the fact I sat in an office for last term instead of a classroom.  Normally my mind is mush at the end of a term and ideas have fled.  Oh, and the second culprit, Twitter.  It brims over with such great ideas.

Firstly I got drawn in by the idea of the Daily Five.  It’s a way to organize and structure the literacy programme, as shared by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser in their books, The Daily Five and The Café Book.  I see there is a possibility of structuring Maths in a similar way; however I will leave that for the time being. 

This structural idea appeals to me:

ü It encourages students to be responsible and independent. 

ü It allows me time to work with individuals and groups. 

ü There are also times when I can meet for whole class input. 

ü Once I get organized each student will have their own goals that they are working towards.

ü  The Daily Five ensures that students keep those goals before them daily.  We have often previously set goals and somehow during the term they have been lost, only to be remembered when we reflect towards the end of term.

So that leaves plenty to get organized.  And I also need to make a general large picture of the social studies unit to be entered into for the coming term.  There are plenty of other ideas also rolling around inside.  Not new ideas, others have all been there before me, but I am walking the path for the first time.  Fortunately great teachers have shared places on the internet to explore and obtain more information.

Subsequently I looked at the two sisters website and noticed the designs of some of the classrooms. I heard in my head, “What if…..?”  What if I made some changes in the layout of the classroom. (I am a structural control freak, you need to know that!) I decide where the students sit, I carefully craft a seating plan each term.

But what if…. Every student didn’t have a desk.  Computers are wonderful in the classroom, but they take up room and they have to be where they can be cabled into the internet ports, although a wireless upgrade is hopefully coming very soon. I use a rather large kidney shaped desk, that I like but has a dangerous wobbly bit on it.  So I am thinking:

ü Get a jelly bean shaped desk I can use.

ü Find a two seater couch

ü Rearrange the class library

ü Organise how to store student gear.

ü Remove some of my filing cabinets

ü Gather up some cushions

ü Make up some listening boxes

ü Put my dibs on a  low table or two

ü Wonder how many actual desks to leave

My classroom is generally the last thing I organize.  My walls are never anything to write home about.  There are other things that take my time and energy.  But this could make a difference to learning and I am rather energized by the thought. 

There is a thought going around in my head about how students will cope with this.  I am thinking that I will pre prepare but nothing too radical until the students return.  Then I will get them to think about the classroom and what if…?  I will ask them to come up with a design, and get their thoughts on how many desks we need, where we could place things.

I already have my jelly bean desk.  I spotted it on Trademe, now I just need to organize the transport.  I will be able to use it for working with groups of students and it can also double up as a working area for them when I am not using it.  I have my eye on a 2 seater couch that will be local and easily picked up, and very cheap.  Nice.