Daily5 = write to self

There is a common misconception about this one activity in Daily5. Many teachers make the mistake of thinking that this is ALL of the class writing per week in one foul swoop.

In one word, no.

Write to self is just that - it is about personal writing, for self. It's about kid having the chance to make personal choices around their writing. It's about being able to manage their own ideas and develop their own style.

For example, in my class at the moment, on googledocs (through our apps accounts) there are 6 different groups writing collaboratively. I have exerted no influence at all over this.

1. A group of Year 5 girls are writing a 'who am I?' series
2. A group of 3 Year 6 boys are creating a series of short stories about heroes
3. Three of the Year 6 girls are writing a series of questions and notes for Writers' Quiz
4. A group of Year 5 boys are working on reports about motorbikes

There are lots of individuals who are working on other writing too from a poetry anthology to a diary and much more. 

So what is the purpose of writing to self?

It's about taking all of the learning, the goals, the genre writing and the WALTs...and letting Disney in for once! It's allowing students to write for the sake of writing. Pure enjoyment, discovering what you like to write about, developing a personal voice through writing.

For emerging and early writers, it is about exploring what you know and choosing what you write about.

For developing and independent writers it is about roaming from the personal and egocentric style of emergent writing to developing a personal style - being able to 'mess with' the known to truly explore a wider range of ideas and styles.

Aside from the 4-5x a week that my students write to self, we also have 2-3 class writing sessions where we explore, deconstruct and develop writing in the range of genre. We spend time activating and moderating, co-constructing and partner checking. We take bites out of the process and explore, expand and develop our writing around that. There are several opportunities each day for me to conference with my students at different times in the process and this allows me to have a much deeper understanding of what they enjoy, their strengths and weaknesses as well as to discover their personal challenges.

Daily5 = work on words

Probably my biggest challenge this year with Daily5 has been work on words. I have had to really think about the purpose of this activity and come back to 'why' and 'what' a lot. It would be easy to grab some word games or create some 'cool' links via our wiki to word activities online, but the reality is that this is not about filling in time and having fun, although you hope that is a side-effect! - no, this is about fostering learning and a love for words as well as broadening their vocab and skills base.

So, I went back to the drawing board this year. Gone is the box of trite word games and in is the box of relevant activities based on our current chunky challenge work and vocab building. I have managed to locate relevant online activities that support, challenge and underpin our learning in the classroom. Based on the chunk/check/cheer model that we use as a school, I have created slideshows on their googleapps accounts and found movies on youtube and brainpop that inform and challenge too. It has really made me accountable for their learning during work on words.

Every week, they have an activity that is compulsory and then they are able to choose from the other activities. The compulsory activity is directly related to their chunk so it may be around a particular prefix or suffix or it may be parts of speech such as nouns or verbs or interesting forms of language such as prose or mnemonics. I have tried to find funny videos that demonstrate this in a way that is easy to remember and the follow up activity always includes them doing something to help them to remember and understand what they are learning. One example was my Year 5 group watched a brainpop video about prefixes and suffixes then they had to sort a set into two groups and match the definition of each. It involved teamwork and collaborating for some who prefer to work together and for others, it meant that they had to get a partner to check their outcome. It meant that they needed to watch the video and really listen well - some of them ended up listening to it several times to check which was great.

If work on words is used to support and guide learning about language, spelling rules, grammar and parts of speech, then it is a powerful tool in any literacy programme.

Daily5 Part 2 = Read To Self

My class answered our reading quiz pretty brutally this year. 80% of them said that they wanted a longer, more extended period of silent reading. When I did my individual interviews with those students, they told me that they really wanted to have an undisturbed amount of time to read by themselves every day.

Daily5 allows for this perfectly! We have built their stamina over 6 weeks, starting from reading to self being 4 minutes long right up to 20 minutes. About half a dozen of my students elect to do a 'double' session at least once a week - that means that they like to read, undisturbed, for 40 minutes!

We have, therefore, had to work as a class to provide a learning environment which is conducive with this. We had to grow reading behaviours that supported and underpinned all of the key competencies as well as to make sure that we were able to sustain that level of focus over an extended period. It has been a challenge but a really great one. Through it, we have developed the different 'spaces' in our classroom and beyond.

For example, our readers who are working on read to self, prefer to go outside (we have a playground right outside our room as well as a deck on one side, as well as large picnic tables). These are spaces where they are unlikely to be disturbed - no classes come out for P.E until the afternoon usually and we don't share these spaces with any other classes during the Daily5.

The other space that they like is the cloakroom, with the pillows on the floor and plenty of space around them. Occasionally, of course, it gets disturbed by someone traipsing through, but it really does serve as a great quiet space.

The real challenge has become book choice for the students - which is truly what this should be about in 'read to self'. We want our students to choose books well that will challenge their skill set as well as their thinking. But sheer enjoyment is paramount and FIRST on the list of importance, which is why it is essential to understand what our students love to read. Not just LIKE to read, but LOVE to read! I have found that reading interviews at the beginning of the year and ongoing reading conferences are most important in helping me to help them to choose the sorts of texts that grow them as readers through a love for books.

Last year, my class were going to have reading bags for their books (never quite got that finished...!) but in the end, I have found that older students will store a few favourite books in their tote tray or bag without much fuss. I asked my students if they wanted to have a book box or storage bag and this might be a plan for later in the year, but for now it's working to not have them.

In my class, I believe that every child can learn, at any time, to fall in love for the first time or the hundredth time with reading. It is a gift for life and by the time they are year 5 or 6 (or beyond) the challenge has become much harder for me as a teacher. I am fighting many years of attitudes towards reading - good or bad. If I have discovered one thing about the Daily5, it is not the cure for attitudes, but it can be part of the students feeling in control of their own reading - sometimes, for the first time in years. 

Daily5 - How Does It All FIT???

Regularly I get asked how I 'fit' technology into the classroom programme, as if it is some extra add-on to the classroom programme. I also now get asked how I 'fit' Daily5 into the day.

Well, let me make it simple. Tech, eLearning AND the Daily5 are not 'add-ons'. They are not an extra thing to teach or do on top of all of the essential learning. Although we have an ICT suite at our school,  I choose not to use it as technology and eLearning are firmly embedded into every aspect of my class's day, so there is no extra 'fitting in' that I have to do.

The Daily5 is no different. Every day, we have a rotation of the 5 activities for up to 100 minutes (5x20 minutes). Our shortest session in a day is 75 minutes (5x15mins). Because the Daily5 is an integrated Literacy programme, this includes my class word study, chunk/check/cheer programme, independent writing, independent reading, guided reading, as well as writing and reading conferencing.

My mornings are very much fitness for 15minutes (activate that brain!) then straight into Daily5. We have a long morning so the 100 minutes are normally for 3 out of the 5 days. I also do 2-3 writing sessions of 45 minutes with the class after morning tea and we have Numeracy every middle block of every day for 45minutes.

We have a school assembly every second Friday morning so the alternate ones are free for an extra long Daily5 session or for me to do a big art project in that 2 hour session.

The afternoons, invariably, are the times for Library, P.E/Sport/Health, Topic, Art and Music. Our syndicate have singing together on a Friday afternoon and we are lucky that our timetable works really well for us.

Daily5 review (part 1) - organisation

It has taken some time and some really focused training (for me and the class!) but we are now reaping the benefits of anchor charts, self-management, a trust model, independence (with guard rails), self-monitoring, checkpoints, conferencing and much more. This is what the organisation of Daily5 looks like in my classroom.

Every day, the students self-manage through using personal timetables. One of my Year 6 students has decided that we need an online system for this and is exploring iCal over the holidays to see if this will work for us. Otherwise, we use a simple sheet in their reading/word study books. Every Monday before school, their task is to have their timetable prepared and out for me to go through with them. It takes 1 minute per child and occasionally 2! To begin with however, we did this in a buddy system and they had to check in with a buddy every morning. The buddy then made sure that there was a balance of activities i.e. the students weren't avoiding one particular Daily5 choice or weren't overdoing another.

My class are Year 5 and 6 so a few of them decided early on that they really wanted to do a 'double' of certain things. We worked together as a class to define how this would work and if it would provide a balanced programme for them. They talked openly about enjoying extended, undisrupted periods of time reading to self or listening to reading particularly, and they wanted to have 30-40min to do these. We decided that this would be okay as long as the other activities were being covered adequately during the week.

They use their timetable to manage their own programme but I control their conference times, checkins and teacher sessions. So a normal day for one of my students looks kind of like this:

You can see that they have up to 5 sessions per week with me. Since I am the resident expert, this is imperative in the process. I work with them individually 1-2 times per week and twice for guided reading, once for guided writing (in their group). Outside of the Daily5, we still do 2-3 class writing sessions where we do Activate/motivate and moderate. During those sessions, we deconstruct texts and look at L.Is for the focus genre as well as feedback and feedforward through partner conferences. The writing time in Daily5 looks quite different, but I will elaborate on that in a future post in this series.

The organisation took me a full 6 weeks this year and a whole term last year. It was full of anchor charts, modelling, co-constructing, tight boundaries and stamina-building. It takes time but man, it really is worth it.

I know there are lots of other wonderful ways to make Daily5 work in the classroom and these people were instrumental in getting me started:

Kathryn Trask @kathryntrask

Judy McKenzie @judykmck

@heymilly

@traintheteacher

and the #Daily5 chats on twitter are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G and just the most incredible learning. Use tweetdeck and search the hashtag, then go through the archived chats. Worth every minute!

Watch this space - part 2 = read to self in my classroom 

Daily5 and the humble literacy programme

This year has been a really great time for my Daily5 programme so far. Last year I decided to really research Daily5 when I discovered what seemed to be a HUGE number of my PLN on Twitter RAVING about it. I read and read, googled, searched, dowloaded, pinned and more. Then I dipped my toes and when my class were utterly hooked, I dived in!

So it has been lovely to start right from the beginning of the year this time and get Daily5 underway right from day 1.

However, with a Year 5/6 class and a range of different word study topics and a broad range of needs in my writing programme, I must admit to wondering how it would all fit...

Enter our googleapps accounts and the humble teacher dashboard, which has rescued me more than once!. I have been able to assign tasks for word study through this and differentiate what each student is doing based on their needs and abilities. It has been easy to include links and videos that I've found for students who need more than just an instruction. It has been simple to create interactive presentations and some of my more capable and incredibly self-motivated students have started to create their own instruction videos for other students to challenge themselves.

The Daily5 goes from strength to strength and I knew that I was winning with the integration of everything when the boys started pumping their fists and going, "YES!" every morning when it's Daily5!

Collaboration and Writing Using GoogleDocs

In my class, my boys eat collaboration for lunch. Then they follow it by washing it down with a long drink of MORE collaboration.

I thought it would be hard to get them to share devices, to gather around a computer/iPad/iPod, to talk and share ideas.

But then I discovered GoogleApps - and the rest is history.

They DON'T share a device. Well, not without a lot of tomfoolery or handbags at dawn over whose turn it is (or isn't) to type. They DON'T talk, well...maybe a little but not usually about their writing. The occasional harsh look at one another is all they need. Then it's all been said.

BUT - with their GoogleApps accounts they email each other and say - Hey! I'm working on this idea, can you add some ideas? Mate - I'm creating a book of short stories, do you wanna put some in? Bro - I need a bit of editing done and I'm not up for it, you keen? - and so on...oh, if only you could read some of the humdingers!

My boys are WRITING. They are COLLABORATING. They are COMMUNICATING. They are thinking, their ideas are shared, transparent, raw, fascinating, funny and more - oh so much more! When visitors come to the class, they storm them with their work They comment on each other's ideas and promote each other's work. They give feedback and feed forward, they respond to what is given to them as feedback and forward as they add, emend, fine tune, criticise and celebrate together.

Yes. That's the best part of all of this - they are writing TOGETHER. Our school motto is 'Learning Together' and they have nailed it!