Voices and the Daily 5

I wish I could turn the voice off in my head. The teaching voice that is! Now don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE being a teacher. However, this summer, I have not been able to turn the frantic voice that is worrying about school, off in my head. I would love to silence it from time to time so I can simply enjoy time with my family or just to relax without being anxious about plans for next year. Instead, if I'm not scouring the internet or reading a professional development book, I worry that I am frittering my time away and I won't get it all done! Is anybody else this obsessed during the summer? Or is it just me?

Part of my issue is that we are starting a new reading format next year. I want to figure out the ins of outs of how I want to run this program. I've decided to incorporate The Daily 5 and the CAFE system into our reading routine. Those are new to me as well. And I'm not able to simply borrow it exactly how they describe it in the books because it is geared more towards the primary grades. So I am going to have to adapt the program to fit my classroom. I have a few adaptations running through my head.

My reading block is only an hour and a half. That poses a problem. Ideally I'm supposed to spend at least TWO and a half hours on my literacy block. Well, it is just not possible. I wish it was. So I'm leaning towards doing two independent work blocks a day instead of 4-5. This would equal 10 blocks a week. Since all the research stresses how important it is for children to just spend time reading, they would "Read to Self" once a day. This would give them 2 1/2 hours a week of reading. This leaves 5 blocks to divide the remaining Daily 5 categories. I will cover "Listen to Reading" with our Read Aloud. That leaves: "Read to Someone", "Word Work" and "Work on Writing". We are still required to teach out of our basal reader, so the story and the lesson that week will determine how many of the three remaining blocks are required. Some weeks I might want to work with vocabulary more so they would have two blocks of word work to fill. Another week, if we have a long story, they might need two days to read to someone. So here is an example of how one week of this schedule might work. The students would keep track of what they did during each block on this chart.

 

August 13-17 Requirements	5 blocks of Read to Self (R) One per day 2 blocks of Read to Someone (RS) 2 blocks of Word Work (WW) 1 block of Writing (W)
	Block 1	Block 2
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

This is just a very rough sketch. Hopefully my ideas will continue to evolve so I can make this work for my classroom. I have a few more ideas but I'm going to go for now. I'll write about the other ideas next time. In case you are unfamiliar with the books I mentioned, here are some links. :o)

Here is a link to the website of the authors of The Daily 5  and The CAFE Book