Day 2 of Daily 5 Cafe

We had excellent results in both fifth grade classes today! Yes! The talking about where the students are at and where we need to be this year helped.  I also did a better job of explaining the plan to my other group of students.  They had the opportunity to write their opinions in their journals.  This seemed to help that group to be more on-board with trying out our reading workshop model in Social Studies class.

We again had students take turns modeling the inappropriate ways to read to self followed by the appropriate ways to read to self.  I discovered that I have many actors and actresses in my class.  Some students wanted to go twice yet again.  Today I allowed everyone who wanted one turn to go and stopped with that so the kids would have time to read to themselves.  One of my classes started out with reading for seven minutes.  They did fairly well.  I only had three kids who whispered among themselves.  When they returned to the gathering area, students gave me a thumbs-up if they had successfully did what they were supposed to do to read independently and a thumbs-in-the-middle if they had some work to do.  My off-task students were honest in rating themselves.  Then I challenged them to read for ten minutes.  Again, we had success! 

My second group of fifth graders I had at the last hour of the day.  When they were dismissed from the gathering area, they tried 9 minutes of solo reading.  Some kids had troubles getting started right away, so I had to call them back to the gathering area and we tried again.  This time everyone was successful! Then we challenged ourselves to read for 12 minutes.  This time I had a couple of talkers who were slow to get started, but finally did.  I praised this group of children for reading 21 minutes in my class.  We added up the minutes that they read in other classes.  My students were excited to discover how much reading they could do in one day!  I left school feeling happy that my students had enjoyed reading today! Now next week I will try the experiment out on my fourth graders as well.  Wish me luck!