Implementing The Daily 5

This August, I made the decision to implement The Daily 5 in my second grade classroom. In planning for teaching a new grade level at a new school with a completely different structure for reading instruction, I figured Daily 5 would be my best bet for incorporating guided reading into my reading block while keeping my sanity.
I honestly didn’t know much about Daily 5 when I initially bought the book, but was pleasantly surprised when the positive reviews I had read were true. The Daily 5 Second Edition is one of those books that you can read in one sitting and then refer back to each day, as you get ready to teach your lessons. My biggest mistake was buying the eBook rather than the hard copy (my sense of urgency clouded my judgment).
My next few posts will be about the process of implementing Daily 5 in my second grade class and some of the modifications I’ve made to help make Daily 5 work for my weekly schedule. I find posts in which teachers share their modified approach to a program to be infinitely helpful and my hope is to pay it forward. 🙂
I’ll start with my classroom schedule so you can get a feel for how often I am using Daily 5 each week. Each day of the week, my classroom schedule is slightly different because of specials like PE, STEM, Computers, Library and Performing Arts. It was a huge challenge to put the schedule puzzle together at the beginning of the school year so these amazing enrichment programs didn’t completely eat into the math and reading/language arts instructional blocks that I like to keep “sacred”.
Here’s a look at my weekly plan so you can see it all laid out in black and white.

When all is said and done, I was able to schedule Daily 5 four days a week for 1 hour, 25 minutes each day…not too shabby if I do say so myself. Here’s how our sacred Daily 5 time is mapped out:

Since this is such a huge chunk of the day and every second is precious, I have been using an additional planning template to map out the details of each lesson and round of Daily 5.
I’m predicting/hoping I won’t have to use this detailed planner down the road when I have a bit more Daily 5 experience under my belt. For now, this lifesaver helps me visualize the entire week and is a great quick reference to keep me on track as we work through our routine each day. Before creating this cheat sheet, I was constantly stopping by my desk to double-check that all was going according to plan and totally wasting instructional minutes.

Now that you have a sense of when and how frequently Daily 5 is incorporated into our busy second grade schedule, I will lay out the details how I made each Daily 5 choice work for my class. Stayed tuned for the first routine I introduced to my kiddos: Read to Self.