Daily Five Day 5

And then there were 21. In my posts last week I mentioned that I only had 14 students. This was due to students not showing up the first few days of school. Well this was true on Thursday morning, but by lunch on Thursday I had 17, by lunch on Friday I had 18, and by 9:30 today I had 21. Yep that's right 7 new students in the last three days of school. They started school late for various reasons; 1 had her tonsils taken out, 2 moved within the city and changed schools, 1 was stranded in New York, 1 was with her father up north for the summer, 1 moved from out of state, and I'm not sure about the other 2. I was lucky in the fact that none of them will be major behavior problems. My struggle at this point is that we have completely delved into the curriculum and I am struggling to catch all of these students up with the pretests we completed last week. I guess that will get finished as the week progresses.

Anyway, I am enjoying my students thus far. I have a good mix, and I think it will be a great school year.

I have one question!! How have I not heard of daily 5 before now? Implementing the Daily 5 structure is really going to make me a better teacher. I will have so much time to meet with students individually and in small groups and my scholars will be so independent. We have built stamina for read to self up to 10 minutes and work on writing to 5 minutes. My scholars are staying focused during mini lessons because they know it will only last about 10 minutes and then they will be able to work on their own. I am seeing how this will make it so much easier to differentiate instruction, which is my focus this school year. I can't believe it has taken me so long to hear about Daily 5, but I know that after the last 5 days I will be using this structure for the rest of my teaching career. My scholars are eager to continue to build stamina. I have never had a class so eager to do silent sustained reading. I look forward to seeing how this eagerness continues to develop over the next few weeks.

Are you using Daily 5 in your classroom? How is the process of building stamina going for you?

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