This week we were able to continue implementing the Daily 5 programme and refining procedures, discussing what went wrong and why, for example one child did not take his books with him, so started wandering about the classroom. We have set some goals for a few children to work on, but they all boil down to one idea - Get organised before you sit down.
I have refined the way I keep track of what the children are choosing to do and have spent much of the weekend redesigning tracking/ conference sheets so that they will work for me. I have found that using the chimes works REALLY well for getting the children to stop what they are doing and quietly sort themselves out for the next activity. I don't use the chimes for any other use but for Daily 5. I was also interested that one day I had a reliever in and the children took advantage of her unfamiliarity of what they were doing and kept on doing one activity for twice as long. While I applaud the fact that they were keen to carry on for so long, we did discuss that all of the aspects of Daily 5 have different benefits, so they all need to be done!
Choosing books seems to be going well. I have let the children choose whatever books / magazines they want to read and this took a bit of discussion about the iPick idea, most of the children understand the idea and choose books they are excited to read. I love the enthusiasm that this programme instills in the children - every day the children ask, "Can we do Daily 5."
This week I introduced Work on Writing and Word Work fully into the programme and the children took to it like ducks to water. Again I have refined the Work on Writing, making posters which show clearly what the different ideas are that they could do and giving examples of what it could look like. I will move some furniture around this coming week so that I can have these posters displayed. I hope that this will add a bit of excitement to this part of the programme. For the last week the children have been able to choose from writing a story, making a card, making a comic strip, writing on our class twitter account (link above = room17pinehill for the class twitter). Now they will have a lot more choice (and have something to follow to achieve a good result!)
Word work has been my biggest challenge, particularly finding things that the children would enjoy as much as the rest of the programme and yet would be beneficial. I have registered for Spelling World, but as I only have two computers (one of which died last week) this is quite restrictive on numbers. (We also have four iPads - lucky us!!- which we use for Listening to reading, can be used for tweeting, blogging or writing on their wiki, or playing a word game if free.)
Pictures posted soon
our class are just kicking into the Daily5 too and we are starting word work as well. It will be interesting to see what you add as purposeful activities because we have struggled to make sure that the activities are suitable, challenging, interesting and not all needing the laptops! We have 8 but once we get students working on LEXIA learning, listening to reading and choosing a reading activity online/on the wiki, we are in trouble! Let us know if you find some other good ideas@
ReplyDeleteHi Kimberley,
ReplyDeletethanks for leaving a comment. We only have 4 iPads and 1 or 2 computers (depends on how they feel on the day - the computers, not the children), so we don't do any digital book reading. We have plenty of books to choose from, so digital devices are used only for Listening to Reading and Word Work (or Writing if the children want to work on their wiki or sent a tweet). I have found that if I restrict the number to 4 per activity, this seems to work okay. With Word Work, I had pondered setting up an extra spelling programme, but have decided just to stick to word games, like Hangman and wordfinds, that I have found apps for on the iPads and Spelling City on the computer. This seems to be working well so far, but will change it up if required. Happy to have any suggestions if you've got any great ideas!!