For more information on The Daily 5 structure, check out out the 2Sisters' (creators of The Daily 5) website HERE. I must point out their tag line, "Work smarter, not harder." I am totally on board with that work ethic!
For "Read to Self" the most popular choice of seating are the classroom laundry baskets. Since I don't have enough laundry baskets for each student and plenty of other choices for seating, students go through a seating rotation. One of my 2nd graders got tired of waiting for her turn in the laundry baskets, so last week she offered to bring in her own laundry basket from home. Too funny!
We finally got our Writing Center up and running for our "Work on Writing" choice. Three students are allowed at the Writing Center. However, since all our paper supplies are located here, anyone can write and in any spot in the classroom. It helps that each student has a clipboard in their Book Bins. We use those clipboards in the Math Corner during Calendar Time as well.
Here's a close-up of a few reference books. The most popular one is the baby naming book. This is to help the students select names for fictional characters in their stories. The runner-up in popularity is the rhyming dictionary. I'm sure that when we have our unit on poetry, this one will be used even more. Another reference book that's sitting in my Amazon cart waiting to be purchased is a dictionary of idioms. We had a discussion on idioms closer to the start of the school year, not a full-blown unit, mind you, and for awhile they kept saying, "That's an idiom!" many, many times during the school day (and at home according to several parents).
Writing center kit "I can write a . . ." can be purchased HERE, and is created by Teri whose blog "A Cupcake for the Teacher"is an incredible resource for lower elementary teachers.
Not only did we get our Writing Center up and running, the "Word Work" stations are also in business! These stations are full of activities that help us practice our spelling pattern words and sight words. I ran out of drawers, and ended up purchasing another rolling cart to fill up with more goodies for stations. So many ideas, so little time - and room!
And what are "Word Work" stations without a Word Wall? Our weekly Spelling words are in the small box on the left. Students are tracked into two groups. Five of the spelling words contain the spelling/phonics pattern that we are studying for the week. The other five words are high-frequency (sight) words. These words are from the Fry Word List. As a reference for their own personal writing, the big box on the right lists sight words, also from the Fry Word List.
I usually decorate with borders from the teacher store, but I happened upon this fancy polka dotted duct tape and fell in love. I used it to create our Word Wall.
And finally, my last Daily 5 choice to share is "Read to Someone." We are still in the process of building our stamina for this rotation. Isn't this the cutest photo of two our our 2nd graders doing "Read to Someone" and sporting our very fashionable reading glasses?! Yes, the lenses have been punched out, and they are available in fun jewel colors at your local Dollar Tree.
So that's it. Four of our five rotations. Our last choice to learn is "Listen to Reading", and once we've got a handle on that rotation I will share photos and news.
