Thinking in Primary

Pin It So at the start of this year I planned to do Daily Five.  I had read the book several times over the summer and I felt that I was ready.  Then, it was the first day of school and guess what?  I couldn't do it.  I felt like my little babies would not be able to handle it.  So, I set a goal to begin in January.  It didn't take until January.  After 9 years of centers it was time for a change (at least for this class). I started Daily 5 with my class at the beginning of of December.  I followed the book very carefully, but I soon found that one day's lesson in the book often took me 2 or 3 days.  I also learned that sometimes I needed to modify the lessons (just a little) to suit my own needs.  It didn't matter though, because it worked!   We now have 2 sessions.  The first session is read to self and we are up to 14 minutes!  Our second session is read to someone and listen to reading (also 14 minutes). ...

Pin It It's been a while!  Sorry about that!  This has been one of those years that I'm just on my toes, running around and working like a dog!  Thanks for hanging around this little blog and not giving up on me!  We've been working so hard!  We started daily 5 but we are taking it very slow.  One of the lessons in the book might take me 3 days to get through.  But, we are up to 6 minutes of reading to self and 8 minutes of reading to someone.  Not to mention that my students groan on the days that I tell them we aren't doing daily 5! We have also been working very hard on our writing!  We read all of the Tacky the Penguin books that I could get my hands on, then we wrote about Tacky. My bulletin board could have used a title, but reality shows that I am not the bulletin board queen.  Sorry! After writing about Tacky we starting our non-fiction penguin study.  Next year I think I'll do Non-fiction first, I think ...

I've been using WTW to teach blends for the past several years.  I'm not really sure what I'm more addicted to, sorts or pocket charts !  Luckily they work very well together!    Anyway, I felt like I needed more than just the sorts themselves.  I found a lot of great resources for teaching and practicing blends but most of them were too wordy or complicated for my kinders.  So, I made my own and they worked great! They work great for word work activities, daily 5, centers, classwork even homework. I've got three sets posted to my Teachers Notebook and Teachers Pay Teachers store.  You can get them by clicking  here ! What to win these or some of my other items for free?  Click below!

I finally ordered and started reading The Daily Five.  I only seem to read when I'm on the elliptical at the gym, so I’m not quite finished yet!  But, so far I'm hooked. So, I started researching how I could use it in kindergarten and I've found a few good ideas about how I can use my literacy centers for daily five activities.  I also found this website and it has so much daily five stuff that I had to share.  I really like the Daily Five for Dummies!   D-K Instructional Coach