Rethinking Daily 5

Well I did it. I moved schools and am now living in North East China. Everything is still new and I still am learning whats expected of me and how to get places. I consider it a win if I don't cry that day. Not that any day is bad... I miss my friends (although my new ones are fantastic), familiar places (I can't order food yet), my students (I love my class this year but am missing the 3rd grade hugs!).

With all that said, I love my new job. I love the people I work with, my assistant, my students... everything. I love that I am feeling encouraged to run and be creative and stretch myself as a teacher who makes mistakes. I also love that I can make mistakes because mistakes help you learn!

One of the mistakes I have made as a teacher is not repeating things. I mean, I do and I love Whole Brain Teaching where the philosophy is "Teaching is repeating." So we do some repeating. I don't repeat procedures enough. I do it maybe 3 or 4 times and then expect that they have got it. Welp, I'm in week 3 and they still have no idea.

Take Daily 5. I would have been happy just getting through the first 5-6 site weeks practicing, building stamina and then introducing the new choice. Yeah.... I have failed.

We have been building stamina and last week we hit 18 minutes. But they were not transitioning well. They were not reading the whole time. They were not engaged in their books. They were not building stamina that benefits the whole room. Instead, we were letting things like taking too long to come back to the circle or being too loud when reading to yourself break our stamina and then not be corrected.

I was getting frustrated. Because I am team teaching, we have 32 students. This means that behaviors are magnified. One person not listening influences everyone to not listen. One person not reading... everyone is not reading. Ugh.

So in desperation, I sought out help. I found someone who has had a few more years of experience with the set up of Daily 5 and realized, even with a stellar 18 minutes, we had to go back to square one. We had to reestablish that being quiet meant not just quiet mouths, but quiet bodies and quiet feet when moving. When we were reading, we are not looking around the room "pretending" to read. When we are writing, we can be thinking but once we have a thought, we should be writing, writing, writing!!

So after implementing a new I-Chart with behaviors that I expected and several times we are back to 6 minutes!! 6 whole minutes to blissful students reading and writing. I think my favorite is when they do not move quietly to a spot and they groan!! I love that this tells me that they LOVE reading! They are looking forward to it!!

Be still my heart.

<3