The Daily Cafe

Teaching a poetry unit with Daily Five

#1

I am a second year teacher and plan on using the Daily Three this year and feel quite nervous about it. I have a 105 minute block to fit in reading, writing, spelling and grammar. I want to work in R to S, W on W and Word Work during my “reading” portion of class daily, and then use Calkins’ Units of Study for my writers’ workshop time twice a week. I have thoroughly read both the Daily Five and CAFE books and perused the forums and website for information to ease my nerves, but to no avail.

My worries are how to match my TEKS for 5th grade into a focus lesson and then allow the students to apply what we learned in the lesson. I guess I’m just stuck in the Hunter lesson plan structure and don’t know how to give students time to practice specific skills that the TEKS require. For example, I would teach a focus lesson on identifying figurative language, but how would my students apply this knowledge during a read to self session when they’re reading a realistic fiction book that uses figurative language sparingly?

Any help from the experts would be much appreciated!

#2

First thought–even though you are concentrating on 3 areas of Daily 5, still call it Daily 5, as you most certainly will be doing a bit of Read to Someone and Listening to Reading (even if it is from you and only occasionally partner reading). Kids need to learn those pieces are still important as a part of their learning to read.

Some ideas . . .

When you know you are going to be discussing figurative language with them, you can encourage that when they are “shopping for books”, to look for at least one book that they feel contains figurative language. They would do that ahead of time–maybe after just a short intro about what figurative language is before the shopping time.

Then, after your lessons about identifying figurative language, their round of Read to self (or maybe a Read with a partner time here), they can share examples of that language when you call them back together. As you confer with them after that, you can check for their understanding of the concept you focused on in your lesson

I can see that using figurative language would fit under the strategies of Infer and Support with Text Evidence, Recognize Literacy Elements and Tune in to Interesting Words to use in reading and writing. I certainly think you could also carry these lessons over to your writer’s workshop.

#3

Fantastic. Thank you so much!