MORE Class Pics AND New Daily Five CAFE Board with Strategy Cards... and I'm Sharing!

It's Wednesday!!!!

Did you see the TWO giveaways I'm running on my blog right now?

Click either pic to find out how you can win this...

Or for of these magnetic pockets for your board...

First up today... more classroom pictures!!!

First... here's my finished writing center.  I really love it!  I have two crate seats for the kids to sit on at the little desk and the shelf next to it is full of resources for writing.  Our first writing unit is on opinion writing, so I have the posters from my Opinions: Order Up! unit displayed on the board at the center.  You can find my Narrative pack on TpT or as part of the amazing deal currently going on at Educents!

Here's the view from behind my table.  I went desk free last year and LOVE it!  My "desk" is the table where I meet with small groups.

And speaking of the table where I meet with small groups the picture above is a week old so... check out what I put on that table on Monday... I LOVE it!!!

See the blue and green circles?  They are actually wall stickers that I put on my table and they are dry erase!!!

I got them on Amazon... click HERE to check them out!!!  I know my kiddos will love participating during small group instruction by writing responses on the circles!  Another teacher in my building has something similar on her closet doors in all sizes and she (and I think the kids too) writes positive notes on them.

Here's another pocket chart with student spots stuck on with Mod Podge.  I am so excited about the whole Mod Podging thing!

Do you have any of these carts?  I got mine at Michael's but you can also see them HERE on Amazon.  Mine are now all organized and ready to go.  I have all of my independent activities for each topic listed in the drawers.  The top drawer is for any "Must Do" students have during the week, then the drawer with games for the topic we are covering... then everything else!

Here's the view from the door.  Don't mind my stuff on that table!

I also gave my teaching and learning beliefs an updated look.  You can read about them HERE.  If you don't have yours displayed, I'd encourage you to do it.  I jut think it helps me stay true to what I do in my classroom and can answer questions anyone might have about why I do what I do!

And last... I hung this "Welcome Back" banner across the front lobby!  You can find it on TpT for just $2!

Now, if you made it though all of that, you deserve a freebie!  Just read a little more...

Today I'm sharing my new CAFE board.  Usually I always always always write out my CAFE strategy cards, but I decided to type them this year and like how they turned out!  Here's a pic of my board with all of the strategies up.  I put magnets on the back of each one and will add them to the board as we learn them throughout the year.

You can access them on TpT by clicking the picture below.  I would appreciate it if you left feedback too!  Thank  you!!!!

Stay tuned Friday for my monthly "2nd Friday Fabulous Feedback" linky party!

Barker Creek Winner & Freebies Reminder!

Hooray!  Christine, #272, has won the set of high frequency word magnets and cookie sheet from Barker Creek Publications!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you to all who entered on my blog and on Facebook!

Just a reminder to pop over to my TpT shop to grab your free copies of my CAFE menu headers (not endorsed or affiliated with the Two Sisters!) and free collaborative "First Day Tips and Tricks" e-book!  Click either picture to head to the blog post where you can get more info! 

Bunting CAFE Headers Freebie!

I am SHOCKED that so many of you were interested in my bunting CAFE headers!  "Buntings" seemed like a very general classroom theme/scheme/decorating/whatever you call it... but I'm glad you like what I made!  :)

I have added the download for free in my TpT shop.

Click the pic to head over!

Classroom Set-Up- Day 3

Yesterday I felt like such a celebrity!  While shopping with friends at a local teacher's store, one of them said my name, which led to a teacher in line asking if I was THE Christina Bainbridge!  We had a nice little chat... but, I feel like such a jerk because I forgot to ask her name!  So, Teacher's Center friend, if you're reading this, let me know!  :)  I know there are other HUGE bloggers who have had that happen before, but it was my first time... how exciting!

And now... for the pictures from what I did in my classroom today.

First... let me remind you how it looked when I left on Wednesday:

So... after six hours today, it looks like this- here's the traditional "view form the door":

Here's our meeting area- imagine 29 3rd graders here... yikes!... I LOVE where I put the cloud paper on the spaces above the windows!  :)

Here's a shot of my "desk" area.  I'm going deskless this year!

View from behind my area- the crates and books on the one group of desks are pretty much all I have left to organize.  I have SO many "teacher" picture books.  I need to sort them all and organize them into how I'll use them for ELA.

And, though all of my bulletin boards have paper and borders up, this is my first finished one.  *Love* it!

So, that's what I've accomplished since Monday in my room.  And now that it looks pretty, I can think about what I'm going to teach!  I even brought home one of my teacher editions to look over this weekend.

Next week's classroom agenda:  ELA focus wall, organize books, get my birthday bulletin board up, and organize my craft "stuff".  Right now it's in a box in the closet.

Tonight the hubby and I are going to see the musical "The Wedding Singer".  I'm SO looking forward to a dinner out and a night of fun... it's been a tiring week!  Hope you have a fun Friday night as well!

Daily Five Mini-Lessons: How they look in Room 10

Have I mentioned how much I love using Daily Five to organize my reading instruction? Well I do. This is my third year using Daily Five and 2nd year to integrate CAFE. I love Daily Five because students have such freedom, in such a controlled setting, and they *SO* get the importance and urgency of reading. My kids LOVE to read because Daily Five gives them choice and ownership of their learning!

I have done several posts about Daily Five and my guided reading groups, but this one is devoted to the mini-lessons I teach prior to each guided reading group.

Mini-lesson 1- spelling/phonics

On Monday, this mini-lesson is devoted to our spelling words for the week. We spell them together, talk about the rule, chunk them into like groups, etc... this then hangs up in the room all week for students to use during "Work on Words" and just to have exposure to in general. After we find out about our words, students are given a page that has two lists. They cut the list in half, glue one into their "word journal" which lives in their book boxes and the other goes home at the end of the day so they have it for their "Speller's Choice" homework during the week.
On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, this mini-lesson is devoted to all things "hunks and chunks". We learn a new "hunk" on Tuesday, review old ones, and always do decoding activities where we find and identify hunks and chunks in words. Students come to the chart paper, circle a "hunk or chunk", and decode the word. We do a few each day until we finish on Friday. This is also a great chance for me to build vocabulary! I usually choose a few odd words that I believe they have not encountered often. It's always interesting to see which words they know and which they don't!
Mini-lesson #1 on Thursday of each week is all about the spelling. We do some sort of game or other practice activity. We love making our words out of Play Dough, quizzing a friend, and having a spelling bee as a class. This past week, we each chose six words that were tricky for us, folded a sheet of construction paper into six parts, wrote a word in each part, and then rolled a dice. Whatever number came up, that was the word we had to write. They had a blast!

Mini-lesson 2- CAFE

The 2nd mini-lesson is always on a strategy for our CAFE menu. This past week, we focused on a comprehension strategy all week. When I choose the strategy, I look at both of my teacher editions and try to touch on both of the weekly suggested strategies. Last week, the 1st grade strategy was character & setting, which they are pretty secure with and we've already learned anyway, so I only focused on the 2nd grade skill of main idea & details. I'm glad I had time daily to work on this because we really struggled! I chose a non-fiction book about fires and floods because the week before, the 2nd grade story in Treasures was about firefighters. So, this allowed us to also make text-to-text connections. We read a part of the story each day, talked about main idea & details, and made several graphic organizers together. I put the picture of one below. On Monday, I introduce the strategy and model. We learn lots of hand movements for our different strategies. Having something kinesthetic to represent a strategy really helps cement it in students' minds. I have tons of resources for teaching comprehension skills. If you want a peek at how I organize them, check out this post.

On Tuesday, I do an interactive think aloud with the strategy where the students get to participate in my thinking. Wednesdays, we do a game or activity with the strategy. This week, we watched a "Brainpopjr" on main idea and supporting details. Thursday is a day of practical practice where we created a graphic organizer together and Friday is always a review.

I usually read two to three picture books each week during the CAFE round, which I LOOOOVE! Exposing them to high quality literature while practicing reading skills makes my heart go pitter-patter with delight! If you've been a follower of my blog for a while, you probably know that I am a huge reading comprehension nerd. Nothing is cooler than teaching kids how to understand a text and then seeing them put that in to practice! I don't teach a comprehension skill every week. Sometimes we review old strategies and other days we learn a strategy for accuracy, fluency, or expand vocabulary. The majority of these lessons are comprehension lessons though!

Mini-lesson 3- Grammar

The final mini-lesson is the grammar lesson. I touch on both Treasures skills every week in my grammar min-lesson. This past week, the 1st grade skill was about types of sentences/ending punctuation and the 2nd grade lesson was identifying subjects and predicates. I always "prep" a chart paper at the end of one week for the following week with the hunks and chunks on the top and grammar practice things on the bottom. This week, I wrote several sentences and we read them on Monday and talked about the type of sentence each was was, identified the end punctuation, and watched a "Brainpopjr" on sentence types. On Tuesday, I introduced the reviewed the idea of subjects and predicates. We identified them in each of the sentences.

Wednesday is always a game or activity to review the grammar skill. This week we played our favorite "type of sentence" game where I say a sentence and the kids make a noise and movement to show what type of sentence it is as well as what the end mark is.

If I say, "I am a teacher". They go "Boop!" and use their pointer fingers to act out making a period. If I say, "What day is it?". They go "Hmmmm?" and use their pointer to trace a question mark in the air. If I say something like, "Today is my birthday!" they shout "Oh yeah!" and use their pointer to trace an exclamation point in the air. Last, if I give a command ("Go to your room!") they say "Right now!" and use their pointer to make an exclamation point. It's super fun... they love doing commands and exclamations!

On Thursday of each week, we finish on our chart and review what we've learned. And on Friday, I try to have them do some sort of "paper pencil" work on the grammar skill. When the grade level skills are different for the week, each grade level would do a worksheet on their own skill.

I also run a "PM Meeting" each day where we write the leader's "News of the Day". I will be doing a post about "News of the Day" soon because I LOVE it. During this time (which is only about 5-7 minutes), I teach and review a TON of grammar every day! We also do our phonemic awareness activities during this time.

In between each mini-lesson...

If you aren't familiar with the structure of Daily Five, in between each mini-lesson, the students do a self-selected literacy choice while I teach small groups. Last week I did a lengthy post on my guided reading groups that you can read about here. And if you want more info on Daily Five, check out these posts.

I hope that was helpful! Feel free to post questions and I'll address them in a follow-up post sometime next week!

Have a great weekend, teacher friends!  UPDATE- July 4, 2012- use the QR codes below to hop along to other mystery locations for great blog posts!!!!!

Guided Reading- How it looks in Room 10 and a non-fiction freebie

Strap in for a long one!

I've had a few e-mails asking how I run guided reading during Daily Five so I took a bunch of pictures and *hopefully* this will give you a good peek into my guided reading time!

Here's my table where the magic happens! I LOVE my easel! My pensive lives in the middle of the table along with a large desk calendar, my teacher editions, and a caddy with lots of writing utensils.

Now that my students are comfortable with Daily Five and we've built our stamina up to 20 minutes, it is time for me to begin guided reading groups. During the first four weeks, while my students were learning how to do Daily Five, I met with individual students during that time to figure out how my groups should look.

This year, I will be running 5 groups. I have a small easel next to my guided reading table and each group *usually* has a chart or other paper where we record our learning or I write things that we will practice. I put a sticky note on the edge of each one with their "number" so I can quickly flip to the chart that I need.

This group is an on-level first grade group. We will be following the small group on-level lessons from the Treasures teacher edition. We will meet on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday.  This chart features our weekly phonics fluency automaticity words & sight words.  This pack is available at my Teacher's Notebook store for both Treasures users AND the file contains the same set of lists with the Treasures correlation removed for non-Treasures users!

This is an on-level 2nd grade group. We will also be following the small group lessons in Treasures. We use the leveled readers and will meet on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. My hope is that in a few weeks, this group can meet three days a week to allow me to meet with other groups more, do individual progress monitoring, and individual conferences.


Group 3 is a mix of 1st and 2nd graders who are beyond level. At this time, it is all boys who love non-fiction texts but don't quite understand how to use all of the text features. Our first study will be on non-fiction text features. Next week, we are working on identifying them, learning what they are, and then finding them in our own non-fiction books. I blew up pictures from a non-fiction book and we will be spending time studying these! We will meet on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Group 4 is a group of all girls who are beyond level. I want to focus on voracious reading to help grow their vocabulary and expand their book selection. We are going to start with several author and genre studies- first up is Mercer Mayer! I am still working on the unit and can't wait to share it with them! Though the books we read will be easy for them, I think the lovable character will help them get excited about doing more author studies in the future. We'll be meeting on Tuesday and Thursday.

My last group is a mix of 1st and 2nd graders who are very good readers and just need to keep doing what they're doing! We will be doing "book clubs". Our first one is on a Magic Tree House book. We're going to start studying prairie life this week by reading other prairie books and articles. Then we'll start the book next week. We'll meet on Wednesday and Friday. These kiddos will have a lot of reading to do on their own so we can discuss and extend our comprehension during our guided reading time.  We also do The Chocolate Touch- which my kiddos love!

Here are my group lesson plans so you can see how I organize them. Hopefully my sentence fragments and little notes will be understandable! :) You can download a copy of this form as well as several others I've made for individual conferring on my class website here.

Behind my table I have these Sterlite containers (I love my containers!). Each group has a drawer where I store their books and materials for the upcoming week. Any worksheets or workbook pages we will need are copied or ripped out and put into the folder inside the drawers.

I think that's it! Feel free to shoot me questions, but hopefully that was a little helpful!

You can click the graphic below to download some non-fiction features cards that my group 3 will be using this week to label text features! If you find them useful or my post, I'd love to hear from you in the comments! :)

Sneak Peek from Last Week!

Howdy!

I remembered to snap a few pics of what we've been up to! :)

First of all... one of my 2nd grade sweeties brought me this portrait of myself this morning... I love it!



Second... here's a pic of our CAFE board so you can see our strategies so far!



Third... we've been studying butterfly life cycles and we made this project using paper templates that you can download below the picture, pipe cleaners, tissue paper, and beans. My kiddos LOVED making this!


Fourth... here's a fall poem we completed on Friday. I found the confetti at Hobby Lobby and knew it would be the perfect bit of pizazz to help us celebrate the first day of fall!



Last... click here or on the image below to download a great "Bucket Filling" guide which Marygrove College compiled from the results of their linky party! It's full of pictures and tidbits for success from other teachers.

And, truly last... have a great rest of your Monday!

More on Daily Five

Ok. Now, I don't like to fly and so I'm starting to sweat a little about my upcoming flight to NYC on Saturday... what better way to stop thinking about it then to blog! :)

So, yesterday I asked what things you would like me to blog about before my trip and this was one that was posted:
*"...more information on how you organize your mini-lessons for Daily 5 would be great or on what you do in your small groups and how you plan those lessons."

Organizing mini-lessons:

My daily mini-lessons are: phonics, comprehension, grammar.

To plan for them, I check whatever the lesson is in my basal and work on how to make the "essence" of that lesson shorter and more engaging. For the phonics round, I use the program "The Phonics Dance", which I got funded on Donor's Choose last year. If you don't know about it, you need to check it out. It is an interactive program where "hunks and chunks" are taught to students through rhythm and repetition. It helps students focus on chunking words and not just isolating individual sounds when they come to an unfamiliar word... and their spelling...! It improved greatly!

As I explained in the Daily Five post earlier, the comprehension comes from the basal and we do whatever the skill is, but I don't necessarily teach it the way the book does. Because I teach two grade-levels, the challenge is covering the skills in both grade-levels so that my class gets the same message as the other 1st and 2nd graders in my school. But we have a lot of freedom as professionals in my building, which I greatly appreciate! So, I am allowed to deviate from "Treasures" as long as I am giving an education that is consistent with people who are not deviating.

Last, is grammar and that is through lots of interactive writing and games. We do lots of Mad-libs too! I also cover grammar during our shared writing at morning meeting. Maybe that will be my next post... I changed how I did the shared writing part this year and it became much more effective. At the end of the year, my kids recognized all sort of "grammar finds" that we wrote during our writing.

Teaching guided reading in small groups:

This is where my judgement as an educator comes in to play. I still run "leveled" groups where we work out of the same story together, even though CAFE does not advocate for that. I feel like it is still important to have groups that are structured that way, in addition to doing individual conferences and more strategy based conference sessions too.

So, last year I ran 5 reading groups. Two of them were 1st grade groups that had on-level 1st graders. We used the guided reading lessons in "Treasures". We read the leveled readers, did the automaticity flip charts, and would always touch on the comprehension skill we were working on too. These groups sometimes, but rarely, did a workbook page or two while with me at our group.

My next group was a mix of high 1st and on-level 2nd graders. This group did the regular 2nd grade lessons that were supposed to be whole class. They did not need the easier leveled readers. We did lots of talking about reading and expanding vocabulary work through the regular lessons in the basal.

Finally, I had two groups of very high 2nd graders. One was four girls and the other had five boys. We did author, genre, and novel studies. These groups were done more like literature circles. We would all have the same chapter book. I often read to them while they followed along and then they would have an assignment to complete prior to our next meeting- like read the next chapter, make a list of character traits, or write a response to a given question. Then when we came back together, we would discuss their assignment, maybe read together or I would read to them, more discussion, and a new assignment would be given.

It was a huge amount of responsibility to put on 7 and 8 year olds, but they enjoyed the challenge. Because these kids could all read and comprehend, we worked on deeper level comprehension like analyzing characters, making inferences and supporting them with evidence from the text, and critically evaluating the text. We also kept word lists of unfamiliar words for each book we read to expand our vocabulary.

I tried to choose interesting, high quality literature that they might not otherwise read, but that would also spark an interest that might encourage them to read more books in a particular series or of a certain genre.

Both groups did a mystery genre study using materials I created at The Teaching Oasis. The boys read a Hardy Boys book and the girls read Nancy Drew.

I also read my class My Father's Dragon and the boys chose to read the sequel as a small group together next.

Other books my 2 groups read are...

*The Littles by John Peterson (excellent for character traits!)
*Tornado by Besty Byars (great for practicing summarizing)
*We love Carole Marsh Mysteries
*We did lots of readers' theaters
*Poetry genre study
*Biography genre study

Teaching small groups is an area that I never felt I did well, but last year it all really fell into place and I felt extremely confident about it. CAFE gave me a good frame for what I should be teaching for comprehension and using the basal was a nice guide. Those two things came together to make a really nice "recipe" for me to teach reading in small groups.

I allot 20-minutes for each small group lesson. Most of the time, they take about 15-minutes. This gives me 15-minutes a day for individual conferencing or small strategy groups. If you've not checked out the CAFE page on my class website, please do because you can download all of the record keeping forms that I used for planning small group and individual conferences.

In the past, I just had a spiral notebook where I wrote notes for each kid. But the notes were not pointed and, often, when I saw that kid a few days later, I couldn't remember what we had really talked about! The record keeping forms I used this past year were very beneficial, organized, and structured in a way that required me to take specific notes... including a plan for the next time I met with a student, which I loved!

I hope all that information is helpful. Daily Five and CAFE have made reading a very urgent time in my classroom... and the amazing thing is that my students understand the urgency now too!

Thanks for letting me ramble... here's the good news... now, in exactly 48 hours, I will be at LaGuardia Airport in NY! On the ground! :)

CAFE Menu Headers

I have had several e-mail requests to share my comprehension menu headers for CAFE.

Here they are below!
Enjoy!

I love comments! *hint, hint* :)

Also... what do you want me to blog about? I'm going to NYC on Saturday for a week!!!! So, there will be no blogging at that time. I would love to do a few more posts before I leave, but what should I say?

Daily Five Follow-Up

Thanks for all the great Daily Five questions! This post is dedicated to answering the questions that were left in my comments following my initial Daily Five blog entry.

Abby wondered...
*"Also - sometimes I want students to do a particular station more than the other stations for a few weeks to drive home a skill or concept. Do you have any suggestions?"

*I just tell students "You must pick ____ today" or when I do my oral role-call before dismissing my students to a round, I will remind them that they have not visited ____ yet this week and request that they make an immediate change to whatever they are doing. I have found that my kids are pretty responsible in choosing their rounds, but when they forget, I just give them a gentle reminder.

Jill asked...
*"So your students only do two of the Daily Five choices per day?"

*My students do three rounds a day. One of them has to be "Read to Self" so, essentially, they have two choices to make each day. I also put cards in for when they meet with me, so if a student meets with me, they truly only get one choice because they have to choose "Read to Self" on one of the two rounds they are not scheduled with me.

Booky4First asked...
*"Question--do you have a separate writing workshop? "

*Yes. I have always had a separate writing time. Last year I implemented writing workshop for the first time and did really well at first! Then I had trouble letting go of my control over what they write about. So, I took back my "workshop" time and made it a more controlled situation for them as far as what they needed to be working on. BUT... writing at Daily Five time is completely student choice driven. This gives them a time to experiment with different forms of writing and express anything they would like. My kids LOVE choosing "Work on Writing" at Daily Five because they are free to just be writers. I am working on my control issues with writing and hope to do better being consistent with the workshop approach this coming year! :)

Amy questioned...
*Where did you get your choice cards at?"

*I made them using the "Reading Kids" graphics set from Thistle Girl Designs. We have a set of literacy station activity cards for sale at The Teaching Oasis that includes cards you can use for Daily Five as well as many other possible classroom centers or workstations.

Mrs. Stevens, obviously a shopper after my own heart, asked...
*"What book do you recommend by Lori Oczkus?"

*I love her book Interactive Think-Aloud Lessons and also get lots of comprehension activities from The Reading Puzzle: Comprehension. I have a comprehension binder at school where I store lessons and ideas according to comprehension big idea. I hope to make it in to my classroom tomorrow and, if I do, I'll take pictures of it and show how it's organized. It has been incredibly helpful to have the binder full of ready-to-go lessons and teaching tips.

I think that's it! Thanks for the great questions! It is very humbling to know that so many people care about what I have to say about the matter! :) You can see pictures of my Daily Five things on my classroom website on my Daily Five page. I have a few on my CAFE page also.

Daily Five FAQs

You crazy other teachers! There are still two months of vacation left... but you are all thinking about school already! (I'm guilty too... just thought that was a fun way to begin the post!)

I have gotten lots of e-mails this summer about Daily Five and CAFE and how I do them in my classroom. Again... thanks for wanting to peek into my brain!

At first I thought I'd explain more on my site, but I am so long winded and just can't be concise and I don't want to freak out any parents who might get lost in my rambling when they view my site... so, this blog post (which may possibly be the longest blog post in the history of blog posts) is designated to all things Daily Five/CAFE. I'll do my best to answer all the questions I've gotten, share my thoughts, and address any additional questions if you leave any in the comments.

Ok. First... please don't try to do Daily Five or CAFE without reading the books by The Sisters. Second, please know that neither one of them are a "program", but are both management tools for how you are probably already teaching guided reading.

This is how it looks in my classroom:

A 10-15 minute mini-lesson on phonics. I do whatever the 2nd grade spelling pattern in Treasures is for the week and whatever that particular phonics connection is, we learn that "hunk and chunk" from The Phonics Dance. We review all of our hunks and chunks daily (except for Thursday when they do a tactile spelling activity for the 1st mini lesson) and we practice reading and de-coding words that contain our hunks and chunks. We also do a phonemic awareness activity each day. I try to do it at morning meeting, but sometimes we do it here too.

A 20 minute "round" where kids are doing their Daily Five choices and I am conferring with individual students or small groups. This is where I use the leveled readers and *rarely* the Practice Book O that goes with Treasures. I teach tailored reading skills during this time to groups or individual students.

A 10-15 minute mini-lesson on comprehension. This is whatever the weekly comprehension skill is in Treasures. This is lots of modeling, student practicing, sometimes a game, and always always always involves me reading aloud to my students. Because I teach two grade-levels, I do the 1st grade comprehension skill for the beginning of the week and then we practice a 2nd skill or strategy for the last half of the week most of the time.

A 20 minute "round" just like before.

A 10-15 minute mini-lesson on whatever the grammar skill from Treasures is for the week. Again, because I teach 2 grade levels and I have to try and keep each grade level on the same topic as the other 1st and 2nd grade classrooms, I do the grammar skill from both Treasures books at this time. We usually always do a direct lesson on Monday, shared writing on Tuesday, and then a game or Brainpopjr for the other days. I also teach grammar A LOT during our morning meeting time because we write the "news of the day" each day together.

I think that covers most stuff.

Other tidbits...
*We have hand movements to go along with most of our comprehension strategies- some I created and others I've seen online or at conferences, so whenever we talk about comprehension or accuracy, we have some sort of kinesthetic movement to help us remember the strategy. Lori Oczkus has a wonderful comprehension book that can help you out with this.
*No, I don't use many of the workbooks for Treasures. This is for a variety of reasons- one, if my kids are doing 30 minutes of workbook pages a day, I'm not doing a 90-minute literacy block and two, I run three different spelling lists in my room that are differentiated so I can't rationalize using the spelling books since some kids aren't doing those grade level words.
*I love using Daily Five. It has helped my students understand why reading is important and how to value a good book. My students complain if they walk in and don't see the "Daily Five" card on our schedule... they LOVE having choices and being able to just enjoy a book without always having to "do" something with their reading.

I will leave you with the biggest reason I love Daily Five... my students are independently engrossed in reading activities for a minimum of 60-minutes every single day. That's 5 hours of reading a week... so, after an entire school year, that's almost 200 hours. Now, my shining example of how I know Daily Five works comes down to two things:

1.) My students' error rates on their DIEBLS tests at the end of the school year have been (except for a very few) 0-1% error rate.
2.) The first year I did Daily Five I had a student who came to be significantly below grade-level. He had been retained in first grade, so he came to me having done first grade twice. On the fall DIBELS test, he read 8 words correct in one minute... at the winter benchmark test, he read 30... and at the end of the year, he read 88 words correct in one minute. EIGHTY EIGHT!!!!! The desired amount is 90 for second graders. And I cried. And I cried. And I cried. And he cried! But, I know that engrossing that child in literacy for the amount of time that he was is the sole reason he was able to succeed. How did he get better at reading? By a crazy amount of practice. I will never go back to how I taught reading before. Ever. Making kids aware of why we read and engaging them in conversation about how we understand reading is so meaningful! It's so cool to hear kids talking about where they made an inference or the need to go back and re-read because they understand that they don't understand! It's so powerful and exciting!

I get so excited just thinking about reading and how it all works... if you made it through my Daily Five/CAFE book... I commend you! Help yourself to the Daily Five download as my thank you for your patience with my long-windedness! As always, let me know if you love it with a comment! :)