It seems like more and more campuses are trying out Daily 5 so I wanted to share the schedule that our Kindergarten team came up with for last year. I'm going to talk about "breakout sessions" in the schedule and that's a time when students are able to choose where they want to go: read to self (R), work on writing (W), word work (WW), listen to reading (L), or read to someone (RS). I have a chart that I print out weekly and I go down the list of students' names asking which station they would like to be at. This sounds like a long process but it actually took less than 3 minutes (we timed ourselves!). I made an example chart below. Click
here to download the blank template.
I change up the order I call on them (of course!) so that it is more fair, since I can only have a certain amount of students at certain stations. The T stands for Teacher station and those kiddos met with me during that breakout session. I like this chart because I can clearly see what session they have already been to and whether or not they have done the required Read to Self or Work on Writing for the day. This is where it gets a little confusing, but you can arrange this any way you like. To make it easier to understand I'm going to list out by days exactly which group I met with.
Day 1 (3 breakout sessions) - Met with Reading Group 1 (highest needs), Reading Group 2 and Reading Group 3. Only 3 breakout sessions so that I have time later on for whole group writing (journals).
Day 2 (3 breakout sessions) - Met with Reading Group 1 (highest needs), Reading Group 4 and Reading Group 5. Only 3 breakout sessions so that I have time later on for whole group writing (journals).
Day 3 (4 breakout sessions) - Met with one Writing Group per session.
Day 4 (4 breakout sessions) - Met with one Writing Group per session.
Day 5 (usually 3 or 4 breakout sessions, but this day is more flexible) - Progress monitored individual students.
Here is my morning schedule:
7:40 - 7:50 Morning Announcements/Jobs
7:50 - 8:30 Calendar, Morning Message
8:30 - 8:45 ELA lesson (ex: focus letter, sing letter song, read poem of the week)
8:45 - 9:00 Breakout Session #1
9:00 - 9:30 ELA lesson (ex: writing for focus letter - P is for ______, shared writing)
9:30 - 9:45 Breakout Session #2
9:45 - 10:00 ELA short lesson (ex: learn word wall word, maybe do a sight word journal page)
10:00 - 10:15 Breakout Session #3
10:15 - 10:45 Lunch --- yes, we had lunch this early.
10:45 - 11:15ish (we had restroom break on the way back to class) Breakout Session #4
Please don't get overwhelmed by this! My main concern last year was that I wouldn't stick to the schedule and if I'm a few minutes late here and a few minutes late there then it would throw off the whole schedule. I'm not going to lie, that did happen, but for the most part the students became familiar with the routine to know exactly what to expect and how to clean/move to the carpet efficiently. You have to remember that with Daily 5 a LOT of time is spent in the very beginning training them and retraining, modeling and remodeling (and modeling the incorrect behavior).
The schedule above is only one of the days. On other days, you might show the students how to correctly write the focus letter during one of the ELA lessons, or maybe work on poetry folders during that time. It gets easier! That's the good news! The hardest part is the beginning so persevere!
I'll stop here for today. I plan on posting different ideas you can do for each Daily 5 choice. Hope this has been helpful and let me know if you have any questions!
