Daily Five Visit Part 2

As you may have already read, my grade level partners and I visited my former across-the-hall-neighbor and one of my favorite teacher friends Mrs. R. last week to see how she runs Daily 5. Click the picture below to check out part 1 of my post which talks about how Mrs. R runs her Daily 5 rotations and what the kiddos do during each rotation.

Today's post will share all the other goodies I learned in Mrs. R's room such as launching Daily 5. I have 7 take-aways in part 2 of our visit to Mrs. R's visit.

[one] I have felt TERRIFIED to lose basically all my wall-space to the i-posters that are anchor charts for each of the Daily 5 choices plus the CAFE strategies, etc. However, Mrs. R. being so very awesome, created the anchor charts during each Daily 5 launch lesson, but when the kiddos met their stamina goal, she replaced the big anchor chart with these small print-outs... Still available for the kiddo's reference, but since they had mastered the stamina and knew what it should look like, it didn't need to be so big and take up so much space.

[two] I loved Mrs. R's visuals for each of the launch lessons for Daily 5. One of the first lessons the Two Sisters say you should teach when launching the Daily 5 is 3 Ways to Read a Book. Mrs. R's version of this lesson created an awesome visual... she's so crafty!

[three] You can probably see in the picture above, the edge of Mrs. R's IPICK good fit books poster, so cute with the visual of the flower, picking a flower... gosh I just love everything Mrs. R. does! I also like her stamina chart better than many I've seen that usually look like a temperature gauge. Mrs. R's room is filled with so many cute teacher-made posters, I love it because the kids are usually involved in lessons that lead to teacher-made anchor charts/posters as opposed to printed out or purchased posters.

[four] Another GREAT anchor chart Mrs. R has was one she made during the shoe lesson the Two Sisters share in the Daily Five book to introduce how to pick a good fit book. The lesson goes along with IPICK good fit books. Disclaimer... Mrs. R would want me to share that the high-healed shoe is NOT hers ;) The picture isn't the greatest, but I loved this visual since I think the shoe lesson is such a cool way for kiddos to think about what a good fit book is. You'll also notice her EEKK! poster for Read to Someone.

[five] In my classroom I use a what? and why? for each of my lessons. I stole borrowed this idea from Mrs. R last year and am actually still using her old what? why? magnets when she printed new ones to match her room better. She uses what? to write very briefly what students will do. I use what? as more of an objective, i.e. you will be able to choose a right fit book. I'm not exactly sure at what point of the lesson Mrs. R uses her why? sticker but I use it [when I remember] as a closure or to set a purpose. Either way our focus is usually why do we need to learn this or why is this important. So anyway, after all that back-story, I LOVED seeing this poster Mrs. R made to go along with the what? why? system for each of the Daily 5 choices. I really should make one of these for the rest of the year because it would be relevant to my kiddos since they are used to what? and why? in my room!

[six] When I read the Daily 5 book, I felt terrible for leveling my books and being sure my kiddos knew which levels were appropriate for them. However, I felt much better when I saw that Mrs. R has her books leveled by colors. She taught all the lessons about choosing books and believes that those are still very important, but she has found it easier for the kiddos to be able to quickly choose books to read and color coding was the way she went about this.

[seven] Mrs. R uses extra time during Daily 5 rotations to hold writing conferences. Although I don't forsee myself using Daily 5 time like this, because I have WAY more time allowed in my schedule for writing, I LOVED her system for when kiddos need a conference and plan to use something like this next year during writer's workshop! So simple, yet I never would have come up with it on my own!

Well that's all for today! I can't wait to work with Mrs. R over the summer to create a reader's log/notebook and hopefully some other Daily 5 (and Whole Brain Teaching) goodies! My grade level team and I were so grateful that she opened her classroom to us we truly learned SO MUCH :) Be on the lookout for our brainstorming of Daily 5 and WBT over the summer!

Our Daily 5 Visit

Remember when I shared how excited I was about visiting my former across-the-hall-neighbor so my teammates and I could see how she runs the Daily 5?!? Well the day finally came :) and it was as great as I anticipated! This post is pretty long, but what we saw was pretty awesome and worthy of a long post :)

So my former across-the-hall-neighbor, Mrs. R, has most of my class from last year (9 or 10) plus students I had either in student teaching or during our enrichment block last year so it was super special for me to be able to see them today! I pretty much got tackled upon entry! You'd never know it by how engaged they are in this picture though...

A little background on Mrs. R's room... She is a whole-brainer (she's who introduced it to me!), she is all about a student centered classroom where the students are the teachers and are in charge of their learning. She MODELS MODELS MODELS as any good teacher should so that everything runs ultra-smooth. It was clear the kiddos know EXACTLY what is expected of them at all times. Due to the district Mrs. R works in, she is required to do guided reading, so she does not use the true CAFE conferencing model, however she uses a CAFE board and each of her reading groups is aware of exactly what strategy they are working on when they are reading. Oh, and she clearly knows kiddos need to move... check out her exercise ball chairs! My grade level partners LOVED the exercise balls!

Mrs. R runs Daily 5 with a mini-lesson to start followed by student-led rotations. They do 3-5 rotations depending on how much time they have, but Mrs. R told us that most days it's 3 rotations. Mrs. R's other reading lesson(s) happens in the morning.
This leads me to take-away #1... make Daily 5 YOURS. Although the book gives a wonderful model of how to run Daily 5, when it comes down to it, you need to run it how it works for you. After talking with Mrs. R. and reflecting, I think it's so easy, when trying something new in the classroom, to get caught up in trying to do SO much that you end up overwhelmed, untrue to yourself and it stops being fun. This leads me to...

Take-away #2... I don't need to have my kiddos check in with me for the rest of eternity when they go to Daily 5 rotations, especially if I'm not doing a mini-lesson between rotations. Mrs. R started the year having the kiddos tell her where they were going and checking in to ask how it went between each rotation, but now since they are so well "trained," a timer goes off and the kiddos know they have one minute to clean up, make their next choice and get started. As they finish cleaning up, they walk over to this AMAZING rotation board, that Mr. R made for Mrs. R (what a great hubby), and select their next rotation.

Okay, so onto the rotations... during each rotation Mrs. R meets with a color coded reading group. They were working on taking notes from non-fiction texts for their animal reports. Mrs. R modeled for each of these groups, and then let them work on their own while she checked in with other students and during one rotation met with students who needed a writing conference. Her kiddos are also working on summarizing non-fiction text (also to help with those animal reports) so each group's colored star is next to summarizing. At other points in the year, each star could be on a different skill as each group might be working on something different

Onto what the other kiddos are doing during rotations... Read to Self seems simple enough, but, sometimes you need a way to hold kiddos accountable.

Mrs. R has tried 2 different reading response journals this year and hasn't found a perfect fit for her kiddos. Take-away #3, Mrs. R & I have some work to do to come up with an idea for next year! I did really like the sticky note idea, but it definitely needs a lot of modeling and kiddos all need a specific goal so they know what to use the stickys for and don't waste them!

Onto the Daily 5 I'm terrified to open up for my kiddos... Read to Someone. I was so impressed by these kiddos reading to each other. The pairs I chatted with had chosen to read Charlotte's Web together, which is a book the whole class is reading and responding to. They knew exactly what chapters they needed to be working on and made sure to tell me they could work together on their response journal but they couldn't copy each other's answers. Take-away #4 With enough modeling and practice, Read to Someone isn't so scary!

Take-away #5 Read to Someone has way more potential once you see http://www.storylineonline.net/ in action. I also really liked the response sheet Mrs. R has the kiddos fill out when their story is done.

Take-away #6 I'm putting tags like these on my kiddos writer's notebooks next year! So helpful to organize topics, points from writing lessons and their writing.

Word Work was so much fun in Mrs. R's class that I wished I could take part!

She also has a great organizational system for all these supplies, take-away #7 the grade level partners and I are thinking we need some drawers like these in our rooms!

In case you can't tell, we learned A LOT in Mrs. R's room today! The kiddos did a great job teaching us exactly what they should be doing during each rotation and of course Mrs. R was super helpful! I have a bunch of other pictures and ideas that I took from Mrs. R's room today, and I promise to share them in a post in the near future, but for now I figured I'd just stick to the Daily 5 rotations in her room.

Before you go... click below to enter my giveaway (your choice of TPT products from my store)! And go check out my TPT Store for the last day of the site-wide teacher appreciation sale!

What a Great Week!

This week has truly been fabulous. Launching Daily 5, studying caterpillars, and the beginning of Fairy Tale & Shapes units, wooh!

So in honor of a wonderful week, I'm not only linking up with Doodlebugs Five for Friday but I also created a FREEBIE to go along with Daily 5, hooray! as well as a shapes freebie and am linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday!

First things first... If you're looking for the freebies, scroll down to #2 for a Daily 5 freebie and to #4 for a shapes freebie!

If you read Tuesday's post, you know Daily 5 is my new obsession! I am so proud of my kiddos and how well they have adapted to the change to our normal centers schedule. I truly can't wait to start Daily 5 on day 1 next year!

If you missed the post on my ravings of Daily 5 and CAFE, check it out here. And be sure to stay tuned as we visit my former across-the-hall-neighbor next week. I can't WAIT to post a blog about her adorable room and fabulous teaching!

I hope you enjoy the pictures (from the post linked above) of my kiddos trying out Daily 5 this week!

If you know anything about me and my classroom, I LOVE cute, I LOVE bright and I LOVE fun when it comes to my classroom decor! For all these reasons I have created a Daily 5 Freebie that features a full page poster and half page poster for each Daily 5 (plus computers if you use that instead of or addition to the 5 rotations). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of those up in my room, possibly as a clip-in system. I also will be extending this freebie to include CAFE as well, but that might not be until the summer, so if you want them for next year, keep your eyes open ;)

Click the image for a direct link or click here to go to the product page on my TPT store.

My FAVORITE thing to teach in reading is Fairy Tales. If you want to check out another post of mine on fairy tales check it out here.
This year I created a new castle for my kiddos ideas of fairy tale traits to fill. They did an awesome job this year, adding a new trait to my list: special helpers; and the only one from my list that they didn't come up with on their own was special numbers!

In addition to identifying the traits in a fairy tale, we are keeping track of the Cinderella stories we read to see which traits the different versions have or don't have.

We've been doing exit tickets after we read each story for the kiddos to compare and contrast the one we just read to another version. I realized that I haven't really used exit tickets yet this year (which made me a little upset with myself). The kiddos thought they were "so cool" especially the first time because they had to hand in a ticket before they could get their snack... oh the little things that keep kiddos happy!

In math, we started our geometry unit... 2D shapes, 3D shapes and partitioning. I introduced 2D shapes and found that my kiddos were very familiar with the different shapes, but were a little confused between trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms. We made this anchor chart together which goes into detail for each quadrilateral.

To give my kiddos even more practice with shapes, especially those tricky quadrilaterals, we made a shape book. You can grab yourself a copy here. Just copy double sided (with rotation on or make each page go the opposite way), fold down the middle and staple!

We FINALLY did the culmination of our shadows unit! We actually did it this past Friday, but I had already posted my 5 for Friday post, so I'm including it in this week's Five for Friday!

We went outside 4 different times and traced and measured our shadows so we could see how shadows move throughout the day. The kiddos (and I) had a blast!

They also did a great job figuring out why their shadows changed... granted we had read about shadows earlier in the year, but the fact that they could pretty much all tell me their shadows changed because the sun isn't in the same place in the sky during different times during the day and because the Earth is rotating. Yay for my kiddos!


And a little bonus...
Check out how fast these caterpillars are growing!!!! In just a week... it's incredible!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Let's Try Daily 5

If you follow my blog, you may remember that I had started reading the Daily 5 book. Well, during airplane time of April vacation (mostly because no matter how early a flight is I can't sleep) I not only finished Daily 5, but I also read the CAFE book.

I NEVER write type this much, so sorry in advance...

I highly recommend these books to ALL teachers, but especially teachers like myself who are questioning the value of literacy centers, guided reading and even their literacy block in general. I know it's only my second full year of teaching, but especially this year I found myself asking how meaningful center work is for my students. I hated that it seemed center work was more of a "keep them quiet while you meet with reading groups" rather than activities that were truly making my students better readers and writers. Sure my centers have been differentiated since day one, and sure most of the activities were an extension, re-application or second/third exposure to work we were doing in the classroom, but it just felt like I wasn't making the best of my students' time. Plus, it's A LOT of work to organize 8-10 centers every week and a half or so (I always have had enough centers so no more than 3 students were at each).

So long story short (or not so short), this is when I decided Daily 5 HAD to be the way to go! One of my FAVORITE teachers, and former across-the-hall-mate started it this year and LOVES it! And well, I stole borrowed a lot from her last year, including my beloved WBT, so she had to be on the right track! Here's her CAFE board...

It gets even better though... I start talking to one of my grade level partners and he is also fed up with centers as well as guided reading... and he wants to try Daily 5 next year too! (It keeps getting better!) So I tell our super awesome, super supportive principal (who used to be a reading teacher) about our idea and she LOVES IT and suggests at our next grade level meeting that we should do a "book study" in lieu of grade level meetings for the next month and ORDERS US ALL THE BOOKS! AND our other grade level partner also LOVED the idea! We even got to spend our most recent PD session watching Daily 5 and CAFE videos... so cool! AND we are going to visit my beloved, used to be across-the-hall-mate (mentioned above) next month to see how she runs Daily 5! Ahhh life is good in second grade land at our school, that is for sure!

But wait, there's more! Another favorite teacher of mine, who I met through my grad program, but happens to work in the same district as me, just started Daily 5 over the past few weeks with her grade level team, and our principals want us to collaborate, hooray! Here's her adorable clip in system for Daily 5 in her room. I know she got them for free on TPT, but I'm not sure from which TPT store... sorry :(

Here's my lame-o system at the moment, since I haven't had time to get anything laminated... grr! I don't have read to someone open currently, it's on the flipped around sentence strip. The sentence strips are just to remind students their choices, I'm not having them clip in or anything right now.

I'm having my kiddos make a choice and I keep track on a clipboard so I know where they go. I think even if I move to a clip in system, I would still want to keep track in some way so I know where they are going and making sure they are definitely doing Read to Self every day. But all those details I don't mind waiting until next year to figure out!

I introduced Read to Self as "SSR during our normal center time"... the kiddos picked up on it quickly and easily!

I used my old center bins for word work bins with different spelling word choices in each bin. This was easy for my kids to transition to as we have always had a spelling center. I told my kiddos word work was different spelling centers, which made for an easy start to these! I am letting 2 kids work per bin right now. If you've seen pictures of my classroom before, you know next year (or sooner) these bins will be much cuter! I'm also trying to decide if I want one bin per student to limit the temptation to chat with whoever they are sharing their bin with.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have a listening center in my class (or many books on tape/CD for if I did) so Listen to Reading is called Read on the Computer for the time being. My students can work on Lexia and Successmaker during this time. I am not sure what I will do for next year.

Finally, my kiddos are able to work on any of the writing in their writer's notebook or writing folder during Work on Writing. Next year, I'm considering melding my writer's workshop into Daily 5, so my kiddos work on whatever our writing mini-lesson was about that day. Any thoughts from teachers who use Daily 5 in their rooms?

In addition to launching a modified Daily 5 in my room over the past few weeks (keep in mind, we don't have book boxes, we haven't done all the explicit lessons for each daily 5, etc.) I'm testing the waters of CAFE strategy grouping and individual conferences. I have to say I LOVE individually conferencing with kiddos and helping them to set goals SO much more than typical guided reading. The cool thing though is the CAFE strategies (Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, Extending Vocabulary) can be used in typical guided reading too, which is what my beloved former across-the-hall-mate does. My kiddo here is practicing the CAFE Comprehension skill of summarizing with his independent reading book using sticky notes at the end of each chapter.

I am not sure for next year that I want to completely divorce the guided reading setting, and perhaps will do "book clubs" certain days of the week or have my amazing para do book clubs (she already takes reading groups and skill groups for me... like I said, amazing!). No matter what I decide for the rest of this year or how Daily 5 and CAFE look in my room next year, I really hope you'll join me on this journey as I figure out how Daily 5 and CAFE will fit into my classroom life for the rest of this year and next year!

Do you use Daily 5 and/or CAFE in your room? What are some of the pros/cons you find?