The Daily Five

The Daily Five: Fostering LIteracy Independence in the Elementary Grades
by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser

The Daily Five provides a framework for managing a literacy-based classroom in which students work independently while teachers meet with small groups and confers with individuals. Students read independently, read with someone, write, participate in word work, and listen to reading.


In Part I , the authors lay the foundation for The Daily Five by discussing their evolution from managing classrooms to building literacy-based communities with their students. They provide details about the research behind the ideas for each component of the literacy block.  During these chapters, they also offer glimpses into how this should look in a classroom, including a chapter focusing on the values and habits that are essential to the Daily Five: trust, choice, community, sense of urgency, stamina, and room to think. Chapter three outlines the basic how-to's of The Daily Five giving readers ideas for key materials and routines. Details are provided about how to set up your room, select books, model reading, shared signals, and student check-ins. 


Part II, The Daily Five in Action, provides detailed instruction on how implement The Daily Five. Each chapter in this section focuses on one trait and provides classroom activities and management strateies. In each chapter you will also find a chart showing what students are doing and what the teacher should be doing for that particular aspect of The Daily Five. At the end of Part II, chapter seven troubleshoots common challenges teachers have encounted with The Daily Five. 


The appendix includes lesson structure for the first five weeks to launch The Daily Five in your classroom. 

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Boushey, Gail, & Moser, Joan. (2006). The Daily 5. Portland: Stenhous

Building Fluency: Lessons and Strateies for Reading Success

Scholastic’s Building Fluency: Lessons and Strategies for Reading Success

By: Wiley Blevins

Includes mini-lessons, activities, and word lists to help improve reading fluency. Explains fluency and its relationship to reading comprehension. Provides instruction for teachers on how to help students develop and assess fluency. Fluency mini-lessons on phrase-cued text practice, echo reading, use of audio books, intonation, phrasing, oral reading, repeated reading, speed drills, and fluency check-ups.  

Blevins, Wiley. (2002). Building fluency. Teaching Resources.

Comprehension Mini-Lessons: Main Idea and Summarizing

Scholastic's Comprehension Mini-Lessons: Main Idea and Summarizing
Written by: LeAnn Nickelsen with Sarah Glasscock


Includes mini-lessons, activities, do now activities, graphic organizers, assessment ideas and test-prep activities.


Main idea lessons focusing on identifying the main idea (big picture), identifying supporting details, determining imortance, main idea equation, writing with a main idea, and test taking strategies. The final project for main idea is to create an informational booklet about a student-selected topic.


Mini-lessons on summarizing include hand summaries (5WH), using titles to create summaries, BME summaries, PROVE strategy for summary writing, and test taking strategies. The final project involves using a variety of graphic organizers to write a summary of a book.


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Nickelsen, Leann, and Sarah Glasscock. Comprehension Mini-lessons. New York: Scholastic Teaching Resources, 2004.

Put Thinking to the Test

Put Thinking to the Test
Written by: Lori Conrad, Missy Matthews, Cheryl Zimmerman, and Patrick A. Allen

In the continuing battle between teaching to the test and providing a high quality education the fosters the development of critical thinkers, Put thinking to the test merges instructional ideas for test prep with the ideas of Mosaic of thought by Ellin Oliver Keene. After explaining how they plan on tackling this seemingly impossible task, the authors discuss how to break down reading testing as a genre by looking at reading skills, strategies, and purpose.  They continue by breaking down craft lessons for asking questions, mental images, inferences, synthesis, schema, determining importance, and monitoring for meaning. In a way that will make reading teachers fall in love just a little, they push relentlessly to incorporate test-prep into authentic instruction, critical thinking, and critical writing. The samples of student work will make skeptics believe that it is possible to integrate test prep into high quality instruction.  
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Conrad, Lori, Matthews, Missy, Zimmerman, Cheryl, & Allen, Patrick. (2008). Put Thinking to the test. Portland: Stenhouse Pub.

Urban Education Exchange

Urban Education Exchange
Web address: http://www.ueexchange.org


The mission fo the Urban Education Exchange is to eliminate the achievement gap in reading. The website has a multitude of different resources; however, I have found that I use their teacher created reading curriculum more than anything else. There are reading unit plans for grades K-6. The literature-based units are grouped by genre, including: realistic fiction, poetry, fantasy, historical fiction and biography.  Each genre includes a number of unit plans at various reading levels for each grade. The units include all of the resources that are needed to teach that unit. Every unit is designed to meet the needs of a high-performing urban school.

Writing Through the Tween Years

Writing Through the Tween Years 
Written by Bruce Morgan
With Deb Odom



Written by teachers in response to their frustration with over-emphasis on test prep in their school. They look at writing essentials for students in grades 3-6, best practices for mentoring tweens as writers, and the incorporation of spelling and grammar conventions into authentic writing.


Besides the discussion on who tweens are and where they are developmentally, section one includes a sample writing block schedule with writing warm up called Living Books, mini-lesson, independent work time, small group sessions, and group reflection (p. 20).  Along with scheduling suggestions, Morgan and Odom provides a breakdown of crafting categories (p. 23) and uses ideas from Mosaic of thought by Ellin Keene to align reading and writing skills/ strategies (p. 43).  


In section two, Morgan and Odom begin by providing insight into the use of Living Books to mentor tweens in the wrriting process. They continue by arguing the importance of teacher's using their own writing with which to model, despite our common fear that we aren't "good enough" as writers to write anything worthwhile. Next, they model how to use mentor texts and provide countless examples and lists of outstanding mentor texts for tweens. The authors have pointed out what stragegy they suggest teaching with each mentor text. 


Finally, in section three, the authors tackle the integration of authentic writing and test prep. This section covers conventions, grammar, and spelling. It also pushes on the need to create a safe environment to discuss growth and assessments.  


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Morgan, Bruce & Odom, Deb. (2004). Writing through the tween years. Portland: Stenhouse Pub. 

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Welcome! Hopefully this site will help us to find and better use the resources that we have in our staff "library." As you use these resources, please add comments to let other teachers know how to better serve our kiddos.