Fostering Literacy Independence in the Elementary Grades

by Gail Boushey & Joan Moser

(K-5)
Do you love teaching but feel exhausted from the energy you expend cajoling, disciplining, and directing students? If so, you`ll want to meet "The Sisters", Gail and Joan. Based on literacy learning and motivations research, they created a structure called The Daily Five - a series of literacy tasks (reading to self, reading with someone, writing, word work, and listening to reading) your students complete daily while you meet with small groups or confer with individuals. This book shows you how to carefully and systematically train your students to participate in each of the five components.

Explicit modeling practice, reflecting and refining take place during the launching phase, preparing the foundation for a year of meaningful content instruction. More than a management system or a curriculum framework, The Daily Five is a structure that will help develop habits for lifelong learning.
(K-5) 152 pp.

Listen to "The Sisters" discuss The Daily 5

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Daily 5

Reviewer: cassandra  melvin

I love this book!! It is not terribly wordy. It is a nice read saying a lot in not so many pages. I have modified the ideas to incorporate into my Guided Reading/independent literacy time (which if you are like me you are continually tweek to make better). The charts that they suggest you create with the children so they will know what they are expected to do for each of the 5 areas really do lead to smoother operation of independent literacy work. The suggested time frame for adding each area was helpful to me (sometimes I want to move to full implementation too quickly). "Building reading stamina" and choosing "Good Fit" books were especially good sections. My students were quite tickled each day as we added time to our independent reading time until they got to 20 minutes. Daily 5 is working well for us, and if we have an assembly or something that changes our schedule the children will comment at the end of the day on on missing our "Daily 5"