Daily 5

We've noticed that many bloggers have been talking about Daily 5 lately, so we wanted to share a little tip that we have. This is our second year doing Daily 5, although our first doing all 5 components. We are constantly re-working things to make it work for us. We may not do it exactly how the sisters would prefer, but it works for us.

Listen to Reading was one of the hardest parts for us to implement. We worried about how much we'd have to spend to get books with cds, how would we keep track of all those books, should they be separate from our classroom libraries? The first thing we did was invest in some iPod Shuffles. These are very reasonable, you can find them for $40, and at times they are at the Apple Education store under the refurbished section. Same warranties and everything!


We then decided to keep things organized, we'd also get matching color bins to keep the ipods and books in, so that it's easy for the kids.


The kids now know them as the "blue iPod," "pink iPod," etc. We also decided that instead of just letting kids choose listening, it would be a rotating schedule. If they didn't want to listen on a particular day, fine, but they had to wait until their name comes up again. Each ipod has different books according to theme, holidays, or whatever we feel like at that time.

The last part was fairly simple, after sitting in a Daily 5 class for a few days. We have Macs, and they come with Garage Band. We didn't need to have every cd, we could just record ourselves reading. Maybe many of you do that already, but the idea seemed genius to us! It really helps because we aren't limited on the books we can choose. Now of course the cds that come with books are more fun, so we include those as well. iTunes is also a great place to get the stories, and those are pretty cheap. We have a master list of books with cds that we all share. It is actually working great! We asked the kids to bring in ear buds, so they don't have to share.

Hope this helps anyone who is wanting to implement Daily 5 in their classroom. What other tips do you have?

Don't forget our Daily 5 record sheet. Click HERE to get it!