Read to Self

The most important theme of Daily 5 is to get your students reading!!! The first part of Daily 5 is to Read to Self. If your students can not independently read then Daily 5 will not be affective. The good news is you can teach your students to read. In the book it says to start at around 3 min and work your way up to 15-20 min. My class picked up very fast and we were reading on our own in about 3 weeks, other classes make take longer. I would time the students reading and as soon as they would get restless and talking I would ring my bell and they would come back to the rug. They learned fast to try to beat their past time.

These bags you see in the picture are the wonderful "book bags". Now the bags I have are $0.99 a piece :) from the One Bag at a Time website.  http://www.onebagatatime.com/shop/bags/nwpp-standard-shopping-bag-5.html .  I used the big zip lock bags for a while but they would break and make so much noise that it would distract the other readers. The bags are hanging on hooks on the back of my reading shelf.

The goal for the "book bags" is for the students to go shopping for a "good fit book" to put in their bags but to start out I picked the books. Now they go shopping every Friday for their books.