My Literacy Block Schedule

I get a lot of emails asking about my schedule at school.  Since last year was my first year teaching 5th grade Reading/ELA using a guided group model, I tried a lot of different schedules.  I changed it around quite a bit, but I finally got it down to an art by the end of the school year.  I modeled it after my guided math schedule that I followed when I taught 4th grade math.  Let's get a few things out there... I teach reading, writing, and grammar.  This year, our writing will be incorporated into our reading.  I'll tell you a little more about that later.  My grammar instruction is usually about 30 minutes each day.  I have NOT included it here since it's not really part of my literacy block.  I have about and hour and half for my literacy block each day.

I ALWAYS finish the day with binder work and a read aloud of some sort.  Most of the time, it is a novel that we are reading together.  The binder work is when the students take a few minutes to organize their binder, fill out any necessary forms to be turned in, and finish anything not completed.  I have learned a little through trial and practice and will post a blog post soon where I REVEAL ALL about my literacy binders.... the good, bad, and ugly!


Mondays:
Mondays are one of my two whole group days.  I use this day to distribute my homework for the week, have the kids write the entire week in their agenda, go over my expectations for the homework, introduce our vocabulary/spelling words, have a big whole group lesson for our weekly skills,  and conduct individual reading conferences with students on my conferring list while they read to self for about 25 minutes.  Individual reading conferences is something I want to get better about doing.  I did it last year, but not near as much as I wanted to.  I will also be using some of this time to complete running records on my students.  I purchased the Progress Monitoring packet from Hello Literacy that I plan to use to progress monitor my students.  We use FAST reading and math as a school level, but I am wanting to progress monitor some of my students myself so they can track their progress in their goals section in their literacy binder.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays:
These three days are spent reviewing our homework from the previous night, having a short 15-25 minute mini-lesson about our weekly skill, and meeting with small groups for three rotations.  What I do in small group really depends on what our skill is for the week.  We may do some reading response, close reading activity, or vocabulary instruction.

During my three rotations, my students are reading to self, word work, work on writing, or reading to someone.  This year, our work on writing will look VERY different.  Writing will now be incorporated into reading.  What does this mean for my classroom?  A lot of their writing will be connected to their reading in some way.  This is new to me, so I'm not sure exactly how this will look.  All I know is that our writing test is now incorporated into our reading test.

Fridays:
Last year, my students completed a weekly assessment that went along with our weekly skill from the week.  I downloaded the reading passages from here {FREE} and created my own questions to go along with them.  A lot of times, I used 3-4 from those already listed, but I added a lot of my own that required the students to go back to the text to support their answer with evidence.  By the end of the school year, this was something my students were experts at.

However, this year is going to be different.  I am still going to assess my students, but I am going to try to vary the way I do it.  One of the #1 feedback comments I received at the end of the year from my students was that they would have liked more projects.  So, I am going to try and incorporate more book reports {in a fun way} and other ways to assess my students.  I'm going to focus on doing more showing rather than telling.  Don't get me wrong, I am still going to assess my students with paper and pencil, but I am going to try and limit it to no more than every OTHER week.  I believe that by the end of the school year, the students became very bored with our weekly assessments (ahhh... shucks!).

BTW- the kiddos commented that their two favorite activities were our Hatchet projects and my text structure unit.  Say what?  Text structure?  I thought that was very interesting!

Hopefully this has helped you see how to incorporate components of the Daily 5 into your intermediate literacy block.  If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section below.

Next Year.. New year, new grade!

Call me crazy, but my mind is already spinning about next year.  I guess you could say it has a reason to be.  I've been waiting for the announcement to my school to mention it on my blog, but last week I found out that I will be teaching 5th grade again.  I have been teaching 4th grade math & science for the past four years.  I LOVE math and my 4th grade team, but it was time for a change.  Fourth grade is such a tough and stressful year.  It's really the year when students are expected to be responsible for their own learning. Trying to 'train' them is exhausting.  With that said, I'm super excited to announce that I will be teaching 5th grade reading, writing, and language arts to two classes next year.  It's been a while since I've taught these, but I love teaching grammar because it keeps my own grammar fresh ;-)  Writing... well, that's a challenge.  Not many people enjoy writing.  In the past, I detested it... I mean, DID NOT WANT TO DO IT!  When I was in my specialist program at The University of Georgia, I had a class, Writing Pedagogy, which changed the way I teach writing.  I can't wait to go back, review my notebook, and implementing some of my wonderful professor's ideas.  I have also been looking into the premium membership of Spelling City.  Does anyone use the premium membership?  Is it worth it?  I read somewhere on Molly's blog, Lessons with Laughter, about he she uses the premium membership.  I just discovered her blog and I LOVE IT!  She has so many wonderful ideas.  If you aren't familiar with her, go check her out.  I'm interested to see any recommendations you can make for writing instruction.  What are some of your writing professional reads?