Daily 5 Book Study: Chapter 2

Welcome to my thoughts on chapter 2!

1. Do you trust your students? How do you build this trust?Yes, I trust them with their own learning and I trust them to do what they are suppose to do after we have sent our expectations and practiced, practiced, practiced.  Are you able to trust them and allow them to be independent throughout all aspects of your day?I am not sure about this one yet. It will depend largely on the group I get and what they are capable of. I always start off giving kids independence to choose. If they can't handle it, I need to make the choices for them. I agree with the sisters though that we are all more apt to learn more when we are giving a choice on what/when to do things. It is like the old joke where you let your husband THINK he made the decision. Are you going to be able to stay out of their way? This is the most difficult for me. I still argue that I am not type A but I think others would disagree. I do like to micromanage just about everything... I am really going to work to stay out of their way though. I find when I can get out of the way, I am amazed at what the kids do/say!

2. How much choice do you give your students throughout the day? (would love for you to share some examples!) I think this will be different in kindergarten. In third, I would often allow students to pick their own seat on the rug, pick their own partner, and pick their own math rotation with the framework of my expectations. I am a big proponent of making good choices. If a student was not making good choices during a group activity, they had to continue on their own at their seat. My language is very specific. "___, when you choose to _____, you made the choice to leave the group and work on your own." I think if we don't allow students to make choices (especially the wrong ones) when will they learn how to make them? That is not to say it comes easily for me, I struggle with it daily!! It is cool to see a student not pick their best friend and say something like, "I think I will get my work done better if I work with Johnny today."  Do you go over your daily schedule with your students or is it just 'posted' in the room? I write a daily schedule on the board before I leave the night before. In third grade, students would come in and read it. They would refer to it throughout the day. I found it to be a good way to keep me organized, especially when teaching 2 different groups per day. It held me accountable for what I'd planned! With the kindergartners, I think I will make some sort of picture to go with each item posted on our agenda since most won't be able to read it on their own. I can also see us reading it together as part of our morning meeting.

3. How are you going to create that sense of community where students will hold each other accountable? Last year I introduced pieces of Responsive Classroom. The kids loved the morning meeting and really were upset when we skipped it. I plan hold a morning meeting every day with my kinders. It was hard in third because I had 2 groups and not enough time with state testing. 

4. Student ownership in learning? I think it is hard for kids to understand or see a connection to why learning is important. I think repeated conversations and pointing out when their learning has helped them is one way.I am eager to hear what others think. How do you instill this in every child? Can you instill it in every child? I hope so. Again, I think building a community, talking openly about their learning, and valuing their work by displaying it sets the right tone,

5. Stamina! How are you going to build stamina with reading? independent work? Will you use a timer? Will you set goals? ... Yes! I have seen some great graphs to aide this process. This is where I will need to remind myself, "go slow to go fast!" I will use a timer and when one student gets off task, we will stop, look at the timer and graph the results. Then we can discuss how we improved or the reason we slid back. I can also see having a mini party (a song to dance to) when we reach our goal!

Here is the organizer from Live Laugh Love in Kindergarten

Thanks to Kindergarten Smiles for hosting chapter 2. Check out her blog to see the links to all the other kindergarten bloggers