Q

I will have a special education co-teacher in the fall. How would you advise going about sharing the load in the Daily 5™ and truly co-teaching, while enabling her to also meet the needs of her students?

A What a great thing for your kids! During the Daily 5™ Block, you can easily co-teach in a number of ways.

1) Take turns teaching the focus lessons in between each round. Oftentimes children will learn things when presented in a different way.

2) Once your focus lessons are done, one of you could pull a guiding readers group and the other could begin doing the one-on-one conferring. When the guiding readers group is done, you both can be conferring one-on-one.

3) After each focus lesson, you could each pull a guiding readers group, and then when finished, both of you could do conferring.

One of the tricks to co-teaching is keeping track of each child's progress. You could each have your own conferring notebook, or you could share one, taking out the pieces each of you will need for the day. By sharing a notebook and sharing kids, you will be able to see what the other person did the last time they conferred.