Daily 5 is the structure we will use to plan our morning. Children will be busy completing meaningful literacy tasks. The choices will be:
- Read to Self
- Work on Writing
- Word Work
- Listen to Reading
- Read to Someone
Right now, we are focusing on increasing our stamina to work independently during Read to Self. Within the next few weeks, the other choices will be introduced. While the students are completing their literacy tasks, I will be meeting with small groups and conferencing with individual students.
Daily 5 is how we schedule the reading portion of our Language Arts time. CAFE is what we study during this time. CAFE is an acronym for the four major components of reading. They are:
- C for Comprehension
- A for Accuracy
- F for Fluency
- E for Expanding Vocabulary
The students will learn reading strategies within each category. These strategies will become tools for the children to use to help themselves become better readers and writers. You can ask your child what strategies we have been focusing on from week to week, and I will periodically send home information about strategies we are learning about in our weekly email newsletter. (Don't worry if you haven't yet received an email--we are finalizing the lists of email addresses that we already have permissions for.)
You can see that the students are off to a great start with their reading stamina, and have set very ambitious goals about how long we will be able to stay focused on our reading as a class. I believe that 10 million hours was a recent suggestion, and if any class could achieve that goal, I am certain it would be 2B!