Almost... ALMOST there!

It's the end of our ninth week of school today. We are almost... ALMOST... in full swing with the Daily Five!

Our Daily Five wall

My goal was to have everything in place, up and running, by the end of October. We are pretty much right on track for that to happen! I keep telling myself that this is my 4th year using Daily Five, so I should be able to do this sooner than my first couple of years (January, Thanksgiving, and November conferences.)

I've been more relaxed this year about the noise level in our classroom. I've also let them work with partners for Word Work, which I've never done before. Thanks to my Twitter PLN, I've changed my thinking this year and understand that some of us need to collaborate when we learn. :)

Yesterday, we created our I-chart for Read to Someone and practiced for the first time. We made it 3 minutes and probably could've gone longer had it not been lunch time! We revisited the chart today and talked about choosing books and choosing a spot to read. We made it 5 minutes today but did have to chat about sitting EEKK and using quiet reading voices.

On Monday, the plan is to learn how we choose partners. For the first few times, I've "assigned" partners. Now, they'll learn how we ask each other to be partners. It will sound like this:

Reader 1: "Will you please be my partNER?" (emphasis on last syllable adds to positive tone of question)
Reader 2: "Of course!!!!!" (emphasis on happily accepting the invitation!)

After partners are chosen, one partner picks the book and the other chooses the spot. Right now, we're reading from our Harcourt anthologies. We haven't used them for other reading so we could save them for this kind of reading. Eventually, we'll expand our reading choices once we've gotten used to the format of Read to Someone.

My first graders are VERY excited that we are so close to having the Daily Five all in place... and that we are right on track to meet our goal!!

~Komos