Daily 5 & Book Organization

I am excited to be linking up with Lory  Evan's Summer Linky Party

about revising and tweaking our Daily 5 and Math Work Stations a bit for this coming school year. This is very exciting because I love both books and love how my classroom flows because of these two wonderful authors. So here we go:

READ TO SELF:

Our district requires each teacher to have 30 minutes of Reading and Conferencing each day.  We are supposed to do 15 minutes of a read aloud and 15 minutes of children reading by themselves. Well, you know as well as I do that that is not enough time for children to read by themselves and get enough practice in.  I changed my schedule a little bit and planned my 15 minute read aloud during my Reading Block and that freed up 30 minutes so that children can read while I confer with 3-4 students. With that information, you have probably realized that I do not have Read to Self during our Daily 5 time.  It just did not work with my schedule.

This is how I started my year off with Read to Self:
The students were allowed to pick two books that they would keep with them for the week. I did explain to them that they needed to make sure that they could read these books and that they were something that they wanted to read. (This is a lesson in itself. J) These were the books that they would practice their Stamina with. They would keep these in their seat sacks for the time being and we would meet at the Classroom Library to make our Anchor Chart and discuss what Read to Self looks like, feels like, and sounds like. We would then get our books out of our seat sacks and I would show each student where they would be sitting for Read to Self time. Once everyone was seated, I would start the timer to see how long they could read. It only took 1 minute before someone was talking to someone or asking for my help. (Just an FYI, our first grade teachers did not focus on Stamina so this was a new thing for these students.)

I rang the bell that I use in my classroom as the signal to gather back at the Classroom Library. We would discuss what happened and we would reread our Anchor Chart together. I would send the students back out to their spots again to see if we could beat the 1 minute time and we didn't.  L

I rang the bell again and the students would meet me at the Classroom Library. We would graph our stamina and that would be our lesson for the 30 minutes of Reading and Conferencing. (Just an FYI again, I did not meet with students for the first month of school for conferencing during this time. I was being an example and reading myself.)  It took us until the middle of September to be able to read for 20 minutes without any interruptions. It made me a little nervous about not meeting with students but it paid off at the end.  Look at these readers reading away in my classroom.  I loved this time of my day!

In 2 of these pictures, you can see our Stamina graph. I kept it hanging at our Classroom Library the whole year.

Each week the students would pick two new books to work on and we would continue to build our stamina during Reading and Conferencing.

BOOK ORGANIZATION:

I have been working on my Classroom Library for about three years now.  Each year our local bookstore has a big sale and you can buy a Walmart bag of books for $10.00 and believe me, I stuff as many books as I can into one bag.  I have many different bins with different labels. Here are a few:

Clifford Books                                            

Author Books                                                          

Dr. Seuss Books

Fairy Tales & Movies

Poems & Song Books

Frog and Toad

Fancy Nancy

Sea Animals

Mammals

Reptiles and Amphibians

Golden Books

Disney Books

Boy Books

Girl Books

Curious George Books

Beginner/Easy Readers

Middle of the Road Readers

Junie B. Jones Chapter Books

Magic Treehouse Chapter Books

Scooby Doo Chapter Books

Horrible Harry Chapter Books

I have many other book bins too and some of them I need to reorganize because their are too many books in them.

Here are a few pics of my Classroom Library:

If you look closely, I have books on the book shelf but I also have books
on the floor in book bins and on the table beside the reading couch.

Here are more of my books labeled. You can also see the end of the book bin
on the other side of these shelfs. That book bins has 8 compartments for books.

I added this because my students loved it. This was the reading couch. The
helpers of the day (which were two) could read on the couch for the day.
The students could also use the pillows for Read to Self time.



I do have another book shelf beside the entance to the classroom but I don't have a picture of it.

WOW!! This was a long post but I hope you found it useful. I am looking forward to reading other teachers posts and seeing how they began their Daily 5 journey last year.

 

Until Next Time, 

          Happy Blogging