Daily 5 - Read to Self in Kindergarten

Each year I stumbled on the Read to Self portion of Daily 5. Kindergarteners do not necessarily start school knowing letters, sounds, or basic reading skills, so how will they read to self?!?

Here are some tricks I have learned in my experiences:

1.    When introducing Read to Self, bring excitement and enthusiasm to the task. Many times the delivery from a teacher can really excite students making them more willing to follow directions.

2.   Never let the students practice Read to Self with bad habits!!

When students practice Read to Self, they need to do it PERFECTLY! If I see students not focusing, following directions, or distracting others, I immediately ring the chimes to bring the students back to the carpet. We discuss what needs to happen, regroup, and try again. (Anchor charts are always a big help with this!)

There have been many times my students were up to reading for 10 minutes, but a distraction occurred that set our practices back down to 2 minutes. By remembering the acceptable Read to Self procedures, however, we were able to work our minutes back up.

3.   Create comfortable places for the students to use when reading.

This makes a lot of sense…do you read while sitting on a hard chair with a table? No! So why would a child want to? I have added ‘reading rugs’, which are rectangular pieces of material on the floor for the students to lounge on. This year has been a transformation with the Next Gen furniture added to my room and the students are loving it! I am also a fan of the classroom ‘recliner’. This is used with a student chair tipped upside down on the floor. Then, the students add a pillow for some cushion. This is a favorite for many!

4.   Keep track of the minutes read on a Stamina Graph and display this in the classroom.

Currently, my class is still trying to get to the 15 minute mark. We are motivated! I find many students looking at the graph and telling the others that we have to accomplish our goals - just a couple more minutes to go!

Free Download Here

5.   Display a large timer on the board so the students know how much time is left.

I was worried this would be distracting, but it is just the opposite! I see many students look up at the timer, then quickly grab a book because they know they have time for one more!
There are many free apps and websites that are great timers for the classroom:

Timer 1

Timer 2
App Timer 1

App Timer 2

6.   Finally, remember practice makes perfect!

We know this and I tell my students the same thing. I don’t want them to be discouraged and give up. Every day, I refer to the Daily 5 rounds as “practices”. I hope this reminds my students that we are practicing and will continually improve.

Hope you were able to get some ideas!

Good luck on Read to Self with your Kindergartners!

Back to School

Yay for the first and second weeks of Kindergarten!

We spent the first week of school getting to know each other, the classroom, and school. We spent a lot of time talking about treating others the way you want to be treated and the Pleasant Ridge High Five Rules. Week one ended with an assembly on the High Five. The Kindergarteners learned from the third graders what the high five rules are and why we need to follow these rules.

Week two was just as busy! We continued getting to know everyone and remembering each others' names. We started our Math curriculum with lessons on sorting and patterning. We practiced counting to ten and explored how to illustrate the numbers 0-10.

We started practicing handwriting by writing our names starting with an uppercase first letter and lowercase for the rest. When learning how to write letters, we follow the Handwriting without Tears curriculum. This starts with the frog jump capitals. With a little practice, our handwriting is already improving!

During week two, we also started learning the Zoo Phonics Letters, Sounds, and Hand Motions. The children had a lot of fun singing the songs and doing Zoo Aerobics!

Now on to week three! Can't wait for all the fun times to come this year! :)