Daily 5: Anchor Charts & Focus Lessons

I'm going to put off my Book Talk Thursday this week to continue my Daily 5 & CAFE series.  I was having a really hard time with the motivation to write about the Daily 5 & CAFE not being in school, but try and stop me now that I've started!  Yesterday, I blogged about Launching Daily 5 & CAFE.  Today I want to talk a little about anchor charts (or as the Sisters call them "I-Charts") and focus lessons for the first few weeks of school.  


Anchor Charts/I-Charts-I feel very strongly that these charts need to be made with your students.  I have seen a lot of really cute posters floating around on Pinterest and the blogs, but these charts must be meaningful to your students.  Just as the Sisters suggest in their books, your students need to be the ones coming up with the ideas for these charts.  Students are very easily guided in the right direction.  Are my charts a little messy?  Yes.  Do I write things down, then cross them out?  Yes.  This is especially true when we write down what the teacher is doing during Daily 5.  I love it when the students say the teacher is grading papers and I always write it down.  After talking about the purpose of Daily 5, we cross it out, then write 'working with students'.  After the second anchor chart, students catch on that everything is pretty much the same, no matter what Daily choice it is.  Please, try to avoid the cutesy Daily 5 posters and make these charts with your students!  

Focus Lessons-I posted yesterday about waiting to start your CAFE lessons until students have the Daily 5 under their belts for a few weeks.  This is to not overwhelm your students.  I reiterate, this is not to say you're not demonstrating these strategies, you are just not giving the students one more thing to remember while they are learning how to be independent during the Daily 5.  I start Daily 5 on the first day of school.  Why not?  This will set the tone for the whole year and teach your students that reading and becoming independent readers is important.  The first focus lesson I teach is "Three Ways to Read a Book."  Yes, I even teach my fourth graders how to read the pictures.  Reading the pictures to fourth graders is a little bit different than first graders, but it is still very important because it aides in comprehension.  In addition to the lessons involved with launching each daily round, you will want to teach focus lessons on where to sit in the room, choosing good fit books, what to write about, word work materials and how to use them, modeling & practice choosing partners for Read to Someone, the different ways to Read to Someone, coaching, etc.  Do you see why I don't start launching the CAFE menu right away?  You will know when the time is right to launch the CAFE menu in your classroom.  


Please, let me know if there are any specific Daily 5/CAFE topics you would like me to discuss in this series!