Gail Boushey & Joan Moser, "the 2 Sisters" wrote the book The
Daily 5: Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades. I read this book and LOVED what these two extraordinary
teachers did in organizing and managing their classroom. Therefore, I created a climate in my classroom similar to what
is described in the book!
Throughout
our morning literacy block of time the children in my class choose one of 5 literacy components to do INDEPENDENTLY while
I work with individuals and/or small groups on reading and writing. These are their Daily 5 choices:
1) Read to Self
2)
Read to Someone
3) Listen to Reading
4) Work on Writing
5) Word Work
Each day the children have the opportunity to choose 3-4 different components, each
lasts about 10-15 minutes. I had the pivalage of seeing "the 2 sisters" at the Iowa Reading Conference in
2009 and one of the many things I took away from their session was that teachers should have 20% of their day spent on instruction
and 80% of their day the children should be practicing that instruction. The Daily 5 lends itself to this type of structure.
I tweaked what I read
to meet the needs of the kids here at Denver. I added a 6th component: Math, to our daily routine. So, my
students actually have 6 activities to choose from each morning.
