Daily 5: Read-to-Self (first update)

Since the second day of school, we have been learning to become more independent thinkers and learners, and we began with the Daily 5.  The Daily 5 is essentially a way for us to become more independently literate through reading to ourselves, reading to someone else, listening to reading, writing, and working with words. 

So far, we have only learned about and practiced one of the parts of Daily 5: "Read-to-Self," in which we discussed expectations of ourselves and created the independence chart below to record our thinking. 

To help us gradually become more independent, we began practicing these expectations for 3 minutes straight since we all agreed that we could definitely handle it for at least 3 minutes. Before every time we practiced, we reviewed our expectations; then after the 3 minutes, we reflected on what went well and what we needed to improve. For awhile, we had some trouble with even 3 minutes, so we added more expectations to our chart to help us attain our goal of increasing our stamina. By the end of last week, we made it to 6 minutes straight. After today, we are now up to 10 minutes of successfully reading to ourselves independently, which we were incredibly happy about today. 

Here are a few pictures of our three reading spaces, featuring lots of comfy seating to help us be as comfortable as possible while we enjoy the books we choose to read: 

One of the main goals in our 5th grade classroom is to become so independent that we can handle working and learning on our own without having a teacher monitor every move (because, after all, who really likes that, anyway?). Since this way of learning is rather new to the majority of our class, most of the first couple weeks of school has been spent practicing routines and procedures for becoming more independent, and we will continue to practice since that's what will help us improve and become more intelligent, independent young adults!

Check out some pictures of us during Read-to-Self:

*Note: none of these pictures were posed. :) Instead, we took this opportunity to practice one of the most difficult expectations of all: ignoring distractions, which in this case was me (Mrs.Allen) as I quickly snapped a few pictures. Didn't they do a wonderful job ignoring me? :) Choosing great books helps, too, of course!