Daily 5 - The First Days of Preteaching Daily 5 Skills

As we have traveled around the country and world so many of you have asked, "What does your literacy block look like during the first days of school?"

This download is a visual representation of our first week launching Daily 5. We designed it after our book was written in response to your questions. We hope this launching visual will provide you with the support you need as you begin your Daily 5 journey.

http://www.thedailycafe.com/public/284.cfm

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If you are wanting to dive into the structure of the Daily 5 in your own room, but are wondering how to begin, we have created a new Quick Start feature on the website to support you. These are the videos you'll want to watch first and the downloads that will provide the most support as you launch the components.

This week you can find our first quick start guide in the series by clicking on the link below or just look on the right side of our home page under Daily Five and you will see a category called "Daily 5 - Quick Start".

Each of the Daily 5 components will have its own Quick Start Guide posted for easy availability. We will also be posting Quick Start guides for our CAFE Menu and Conferring Notebooks as well, so watch for those.

To view the Quick Start Guide to Launching The Daily 5 click here:

The comprehension strategy 'Check for Understanding' is the first strategy we teach all of our students on the first day of school. This is one of the strategies we refer to as a "preteaching" lesson. We teach this strategy and reinforce it often, since it is a strategy readers do on their own and when reading with a partner.

In this video, Joan team teaches with Natalie in her K-2 multiage class. Together they practice the Check for Understanding strategy in front of the class. This strategy lesson happens to be anchored to Read to Someone, which is a critical link in the success of Read to Someone.

In this third of a three part video series, Daniel and Joan work together to set goals for Maria, one of Daniel's youngest ELL learners. After discussing what she already knows, they decide to move her forward by using something Maria is very interested in...the letters in her name.

Joan and Daniel use the Pensieve, also called the conferring notebook, to record Maria' strengths as well as her goals. They also use the calendar, a vital piece to the Pensieve, to keep track of the next time Daniel will confer with her.

Three Ways to Read a Book is a lesson we find to be foundational before we introduce Read to Self. Its necessity became very clear one year as we were asking students to read to themselves and about one half of our first graders chimed in, "I don't know how to read".

How could we possibly ask students to read independently if they truly did not possess reading skills? At that time we would partner students up or create a center for them to do, because they couldn't read words yet.

We heard a similar response when asking our older students who were ELL, just arriving to our country and not being able to read English. Without books in the 30+ different languages in our schools we felt caught and a bit frustrated. To us it was a bit of "the chicken or the egg". As we researched beginning reading acquisition we discovered children learn to read by engaging in the act of reading by "Reading the Pictures", "Reading the Words" and also "Retelling a Familiar Story".

Until next week!