Transcript

Another of the things that I use in my classroom on a daily basis is the Daily 5. What it is, is five different activities that the students will be working on. The first one is Read to Self, there's a whole way to introduce this that the book recommends. The idea is to get students to work right away, so we do practices. 

You find the students that you know will have difficulty just sitting down, right away, and reading the whole time. The second activity that I introduce is the Read to Someone. It's very similar to the first one but the difference is that now they're going to read with a friend. You even have to teach them how to sit down because the natural thing for them to do is to sit one across the other person, which creates the problem that one has the book in front of them and the other one has it backwards and that person is not reading. So they have to sit next to each other, very close to each other so the book is in the middle and they follow, when one or both of them are reading, with their fingers.

So one of the things we talk about is the eekk position, what does it mean? We talk about the spider. If you see a spider, what would you do? Eekk! They go like this, they show me that they are very scared. What it means is it's actually E-E-K-K: elbow to elbow, knee to knee. Whatever place they're sitting, if it's on the carpet, on the mat or on a chair, they really need to be next to each other - elbow to elbow, knee to knee. 
Then I introduce the Listen to Reading and they love that one because they get to listen to a book from a CD and also read the book at the same time. They do this with a partner. There's a station for this and they go two at a time, and then when they're finished, the other two students will come. 

The next type of activities that I introduce is the Work on Writing. This one varies throughout the year. The students develop very quickly in the First Grade. I use tools like sentence starters or many combinations that they can just go on their own, work, and then they show me their final results. Here's one of those tools. These are cubes and they have something written on it. The students throw the dice and then they read what they got. In this case, this one says "school is good because" and then it gives an idea of what to write about; "school is good because" and then they finish the sentence.

At the beginning of the year, the students tend to just copy this and then finish the sentence, and that's it. That's all the time they have to do it. As they get better and better, then they finish the sentence and then I ask them, "tell me more. Tell me more. Why? Why is that?" Then they get to write a whole page about that.  
Here is another example. This is  Silly Starters  which they love. These type of resources has hundreds of possible combinations. For example, "write a silly story about an elephant that can talk". But another time, they can flip this and this and it becomes "write a poem about an elephant that is very dirty". The idea is to get them engaged, feel that they are writers, and that they can actually write something. They are proud of it, whatever they write, and it's very amazing to see. 

If you ask a First Grade student, go sit down and write about something, they're going to start thinking, what do I write about? I dont know what to say. I don't know what to write about. At the end of the day, you're going to see that their page is blank. Sometimes though, I tell them you don't have to use this if you have something to write about. Sometimes they do have something they want to write about. So they're free to do that, but when they have times when they don't know what to write about, there it is. No excuses.

The last center of Daily 5 is Word Work. Word Work is to help them work with spelling and I have a lot of games that the students can use and they get really engaged. The idea is that they are having fun with games but at the same time they're learning. This type of game allows them to recognize words, sight words, word families or blends, blending sounds, or play  Bingo  with words. All those kinds of things without even knowing. They are reading, they are using their previous knowledge about writing and there are tiles that they can put together and form words at the beginning. Once they are good with that, they can move on to form sentences. Many possibilities that they can use to improve their knowledge about words and letter sounds and how they can put them together to form words and sentences.