Daily 5-So I have decided to make it my own!

As for the five different "centers" or activities students can choose from, I have decided to change them a bit. I still have students do: read to self, read to someone, listen to reading and word work, but I have added language arts games instead of practicing writing. I love my writer's workshop and am in no way going to give that up...especially after all of the research that I did that found that it was the best way for students to become effective writers. Even more so though...I have seen so much growth in my students due to writer's workshop. I think that the Language arts game activities give my students another opportunity to practice the phonics and grammar skills that we have been working on and it gives them a fun way of doing that. I have also taken away my students ability to choose which group they go into each day. I know that student choice is super important, but the group of students that I have this year just can't seem to handle it. They never remember which activities they have already done and "accidentally" repeat the ones that they like. This has left me with groups of 8-10 students in one activity at a time and it just hasn't made things productive. I have tried keeping track of their choices for them, but that didn't seem to work either. I figure we can go back to student choice once they have gotten the rest of the routines down.

Since I am making things my own I thought that I would branch out from the daily five and look for ways to enhance it through literacy stations. I found this article that I thought was helpful:

http://www.stenhouse.com/pdfs/0353ch01.pdf

The Daily 5- Is it too late to start this effectivly?

So I have been implementing parts of the Daily 5 in my classroom for a month or so. After reading the book and discovering that this format has students spend like 2 hours in the Daily 5 every day I decided that there was no way I could squeeze that kind of time out of my already cramped day. So I have been having my students spend approximately an hour in my reading block. I guess you could say that my classroom is set up more like a reader's workshop than a Daily 5 classroom as I have taken bits and pieces of information from many different resources to make a unique model that I hope will work in my classroom with the group of students that I have this year. So far we have spent a lot of time talking about the students behaviors should look like and have spent some time creating I-Charts. Unfortunately, I think that their routines and behaviors (good and bad) are pretty set for the year. It is hard to break old habits this late in the year. I think that what I need to do is spend more time at the beginning of the year forming good habits. That is something that I have never really spent enough time on and plan to make a priority next time. You live and learn I guess.