Making Daily 5 work for me

I’m not sure if the Daily 5 book study is still going or not… I haven’t seen any posts recently. But Chapter 7 is all about trouble shooting and it really made me think about how/if I could make this work in my classroom. I came to the conclusion that I CAN make it work, but with some adjustments. Here are my problems with doing Daily 5 the way it is presented in the book:

1. The Book says to do 5 30-minute rotations. . . That’s an hour and a half! I only have an hour for rotations.

2. The book says to pull kids while they are working on other parts of Daily 5. I have four groups that I need to see for 15 minutes each, no exceptions.

3. The book says the kids can have free reign over deciding what to do when, and where to do it. I know, from 6 years in the same neighborhood, that these kids can’t handle that. Some choice yes, but they need structure.

4.  My students are expected to use the computers. Our district actually monitors student usage of the computers to make sure they are getting a good amount of time on them.

So here’s how I’m going to make it work for me, because I do really like the components of Daily 5 and I think it really simplifies things down from having so many centers all over the room. I will continue to do four rotations during my hour block. You can see by my board from last year here how I do that – One rotation is always reading group with me and the others were centers around the room.

I am going to simply combine my other centers into the daily 5 like this:

So each day my students will meet with me, rotate to either read to self/read to someone, rotate to either word work/writing center, and rotate to either listen to reading/computers. For read to self and read to someone I will let them choose where to work. However, computers will always be at the computers, word work at the word work center, work on writing at the writing center, listen to reading at the listening center. This way they still get to choose where to sit during one of their rotations, but I don’t have to deal with the entire class choosing (and fighting over) where to sit. The literacy games I have made in my various units will provide lots of choice at the word work center.

So on any given day my work board might look like this:

 Let me explain it a little... the kids are in four groups based on level. Red, yellow, green and blue. Each letter within the group stands for a kid. Normally the index cards have their name and picture. A and B are always partners, C and D are always partners. So Kid A in the red group will go with his partner B to reading group with me, then read to self, then listen to reading, then word work. He'll do this for two days, then I'll swap them so that he goes where C and D went - first to me, then to read to someone, then to computer, then to work on writing. 

I’ll keep you updated on how it goes once we get it started in a few weeks.

In other news, I’ve added alphabet posters for all my themes, and added an adorable cowboy western theme.

How about you? Are you using Daily 5? Will you make any changes?

Center Organization & Storage

I've had a few emails lately about how I store and organize my centers to keep track of it all. I'm sure there are a gazillion ways to do this, but here's what works for me.....

A hard copy of each center pack I make goes into a file folder.

This contains all the directions, hard copies and worksheets

The game pieces go into ziploc baggies sorted by game

Then, both the file and the ziplocs go into a hanging pocket file. I love the pocket ones because nothing falls out the sides. They can be a little pricy so I try to catch them on sale or add them onto my supply orders. If you don't mind paying full price you can get them here.

Then the pocket file goes into my filing cabinet. I have them in order from the beginning of the year to the end.

As you can see, mine don't actually hang. My cabinets seem to be missing the metal rods to hang stuff.

And that's what works for me!!

Centers Part 2

Here is how I organize my centers:
Each student is assigned to a group on our work board, either red, yellow, green or blue:

Within their group they have a partner (or two) with whom they work. Each row is a partnership.

Next to their names is the centers they will go to. There are four pictures next to their names for center 1, 2, 3, and 4.

During the first rotation the red group comes to the guided reading table and everyone else goes to their center under number1.

Each center is labelled with a picture that corresponds to the picture on the board so everyone remembers where to go.

After 15 minutes we clean up and get ready to rotate. Everyone goes to the center located under number 2 next to their name. This continues for rotations 3 and 4.

This picture shows what my room looks like during centers, with students working in different areas:

Also next to each partner group at the end of the row is their math center for the day. These are the numbers under M for math.

Each group goes to one center Mondays & Wednesday and we rotate the centers until everyone has had a turn. Then I switch out the activities in the centers. The math bins 1-5 are labelled with corresponding number pictures.

The table where they do that bucket is labelled with a matching picture so they know where to sit:

 And the shelf also has the same matching picture so they know where to put the bucket back.

Center 6 is the computer, and 7&8 come to the teacher table.

I know there are many, many great ways to do centers. This is the way the majority of the teachers at my school were doing centers when I started there 6 years ago, so this is how I do them too!

Centers Part 1

This week we began our literacy centers. We only did one center and I did not pull any groups. I walked around and monitored that all my students were working and knew what to do. I am losing 3 students to a new teacher soon and then we will start centers for real. Here are the things we worked on this week:

Pocket Chart Center - Students picked a spider out of the bucket and matched the picture to the web with it's beginning sound. 

Listening Center - Students listened to a book on tape then filled out a response page.

Leap Pad Center - Students worked on short vowels in the Leap Frog books.

Computer Center - Students worked at starfall.com and typing sight words into Microsoft Word.

ABC Center - students matched up halloween themed Upper and Lower case letters.

Library - Students selected a book to read.

Writing Center - Students rolled the dice and wrote down if it landed on capital or lowercase Mm.

Game Shelf - Monster Sight Words, students picked a monster and colored their sheet to match. Then they practiced writing the sight words.

Name Game - Students picked a classmates name and sorted the letters that were/were not in their name.

Word Work - Monster Sounds. Students picked a monster, colored their sheet to match and gave a happy face for a beginning Mm sound and a sad face for any other beginning sound.

These are the basic centers we will do each week in addition to me pulling reading groups. The activities will change from week to week and the students will rotate between 3 centers and my table. More on how I organize that later....
Next week we will begin rotations and I will be putting more halloween themed stuff into the centers.
The monster games are from Julie Lee's Monster Unit.