Cafe Chapter 1 Discussion

I am so excited to start the CAFE book as I have several teacher friends in other districts that are beginning to use this approach to their guided reading time and love it!

The core elements of CAFE are the teacher notebook (who doesn't love to feel organized during reading instruction!), goal setting (a major part of all education initiatives that are coming up such as the learning goal stated for each lesson that you teach or goal for the week posted in your classroom in kid friendly terms for each topic), basing student groups on needs and not reading levels and whole group instruction based on needs of the majority of the class (again, another part of education initiatives which is ensuring that students are exposed to grade level material and standards before standardized testing and not differentiated too much). 

The biggest area that I am struggling with right now is grouping students based on their skill deficit and not on reading level.  I think that this is something that I struggle with because that is not the “Purdue Way” of teaching reading that was chiseled into my head during reading.  But, this is why we are all taking part in this book club, to open our minds to new ways of teaching. 

What are the areas that you are struggling with right now?

Daily 5 Chapter 7 Discussion

Today we ended our reading of the Daily 5!  How are you feeling?  Are you excited to start the school year and try this in your classroom or do you still have questions on how it will work in your classroom? 

The Sisters did a great job of answering the majority of the questions that I still had in this chapter. One of the topics that I still am questioning is the use of the "Check-In" page.  Is is worth the time to go through and ask every student which choice they are choosing for each round or is it better to assign their choices to them?  Also, do you have enough resources to support students choosing each round (i.e. you only have 4 computers in your room so that limits how many can choose this each round)?  Several teachers at Klondike have combatted this problem by using a visual board on their ENO board.  Kara Meyer created schedules for each day of the week and predetermined what choice each student will have each day.  She used student pictures and graphics to visualize what Daily 5 activity each child will do during each round. 

Intermediate teachers, how are you feeling about the idea that your students do more of a Daily 3?  The Sisters say to use Read to Self, Read to Somone and Work on Writing during your reading block time, but since we can't work on Writing, what would you choose instead?  Could your students benefit from Word Work or perhaps you use that time for SuccessMaker?  Like I stated on my last post, the new Journey's does have a more succient phonics and spelling section that links these two together allowing you to work on this "Word Work" during your Reading block because it is a phonics based program and not a seperate spelling program.

We will now jump into the Cafe book.  I am looking into the week of August 6th for our meeting due to 4-H fairs coming up next week. 

Daily 5 Chapter 6 Discussion

This week, the sisters have talked about Work on Writing and Word Work. The unfortunte part is that with the stipulations on the 90 minute reading block, we will not be able to work on Work on Writing. What will you do with this block of time during your Daily 5? Several teachers have their students work on SuccessMaker Reading while others might work on ACUITY Reading practice.

The second part of the chapter discussed Word Work. Yesterday, I attended the textbook meeting where Journey's was adopted. Journey's does have spelling and phonics tied together in the reading series so this would be a good time to tie these two concepts together during your Daily 5 Word Work time.

We also discussed as a group how Spelling would look on our new report cards. Spelling will be practiced during Reading Foundations, however it will be assessed in Language. Vocabulary is also included in the new Journey's series that ties with the story. The interesting thing about Journey's is that the vocabulary is presented in context instead of with just the definition. What would you focus on during your Word Work time: Spelling, vocabulary or both? What materials will you have available for your students to use?

Daily 5 Chapter 5 Discussions

First of all, I would like to apologize for not writing sooner.  We closed on our first home today and the Daily 5 slipped my mind!!

"The Sisters" really have put great procedures and modeling into place to make Read to Someone and Listen to Reading successful. On "The Daily Cafe" website, I found the focus lessons and sample I-Chart all in one place, so I have placed it below for you.

**Intermediate Teachers**  Another interesting fact that I read online was that for intermediate students, "The Sisters" do not believe that all of them need to do Read To Someone.  They stated that once a student reaches a 4th grade reading level that Read to Someone becomes laborious and not engaging for them.  However, they did say that it is good for your auditory processing students who need that extra support with fluency and to have them choose Good Fit books.  They also said that intermediate students can read two different books, however they simply need to take turns reading aloud and discussing the text.


Examples of other charts created during Read To Someone are EEKK and Ways To Read to Someone.  Here are some examples that I found:
 
Ensuring that you introduce these new skills slowly and taking the time to teach students what to do and think is important so that your Daily 5 runs smoothly in your classroom.  If you start Daily 5 at the beginning of the school year and it isn't running as smoothly as it sounds in the book, e-mail Rhonda!  She will be able to come in and help you get on track or she could cover your classroom so that you could watch another of your teaching colleagues implement the strategies.  We have so many wonderful teachers and resources at KES, we just need to remember to take advantage of all of them!

Listening to Reading is something that might seem easy for everyone as you probably already do something similar to this in your classroom.  Student can share a tape recorder and several books together or students can listen to books on their own with an IPOD.  You might think of writing a PTO mini grant to get 4-5 IPODS and ear buds and create mini Listening to Reading stations.  Then you can have guest readers read the books to the student (anyone with an IPHONE can record themselves reading and then e-mail the audio file to the teacher to place on the IPOD).  Scott and I have done this for several teachers and it works pretty well!  There are also some websites that have celebrities reading books to students.  One such website is the Screen Actor's Guild and the link for that is found here.