New Daily 5 Management ideas and freebie!

I know so many of you out there have implemented Daily 5 in your own classroom. I have used this structure faithfully for three years now and love the independence it has created for my students. However, I have had to do some major rethinking about Word Work recently to fit with my expectations for my students.

How many of you have had to tweak the structure a little?

Here's my thinking and rationale as well as the new chart I made. I have freebies included in the post if you're interested in making the chart for yourself.

See, I have always struggled with making sure my students were changing activities within word work. They are usually very on-task but I noticed the same students were always using watercolors or another group always chose whiteboard practice, etc... Then, whenever I put out a word work game, that's all they would choose. For example, sight word Jenga was a huge hit but that was all a few would do during word work. On top of all that, I have my students on differentiated sight word lists and want them to be able to practice reading and spelling those words during word work as well. I tried a word work menu in March but watched and noticed that only my rule followers actually used the menu correctly. Many others just continued to go where they pleased.

I began to think about how I could break word work down into different choices so that the students could be as independent with these as they were with read to self,  read to someone and work on writing.

So this is what I think will work for me and I wanted to share in case any of you had noticed these same issues in your own classroom.

I broke word work into these 3 choices: Sight word work, Weekly Word Work and Games. Sight word work is where they will practice their individual lists. Weekly word work will be word family words and games will be the many literacy games I put out to play to reinforce skills. I will still give choice within these rotations but now students will be more focused on their task. I also added a Teacher's Choice for various seasonal activities/ literacy centers I make.

Here's the new chart I made to reflect these changes. Oh, by the way, I threw in poetry as well! Why not?

P.S. The right side is crooked. That will be fixed! :)

Half the class will use the right side and half the class will use the left side. They will move straight down and retrun back to the top when at the bottom. I use clothespins with names to keep track of students.  Let me know what you think! If you want to make this chart, click here.

Happy Monday!