Daily Five
To use this lesson, you must have a LevelUp Reader account. If you do not have an account, you can register for a 30-day free trial here!
Background: Daily 5 is a literacy framework that asks teachers to engage in five daily literacy activities: Listen to Reading, Read to Self, Read to Someone, Word Work, and Work on Writing. This is a flexible model, allowing for activities to occur in a block or be implemented within other curricular activities. Independent choice of books to read/listen to and writing topics are critical components of the Daily 5. By allowing teachers to assign students a large group of varied texts on the LevelUp Reader platform according to the students’ interests and reading levels—essentially using LevelUp Reader as an electronic “book bin”—and teach them to use the platform themselves, LevelUp Reader lends itself well to student independence. In the sample Daily 5 “round” below, students are using a group of six thematically related LevelUp Reader books in a genre study.
Sample Lesson – Grade: 1
Content: ELA
Resources/Materials:
- Whose Back Is This?
- Whose Eyes Are These?
- Whose Nose Is This?
- Whose Teeth Are These?
- Whose Toes Are Those?
- Whose Tongue Is This?
Additional Resources:
| Listen to Reading | Choose one of the Whose… animal books for a group read-aloud, engaging in answering text-based questions as a group. Have students predict the answer to the questions in the text before turning the page to reveal the answer. Questions should be geared towards helping the students start to identify the characteristics of a nonfiction text: “Are the animals in this book real? How do you know that?” |
| Read to Self | Have students choose another of the six Whose… animal books to read on their own. Remind them that there are three ways to read a book to yourself: read the words; look at the pictures; turn the pages and retell the story as you go. |
| Read to Someone | Have students choose another of the six Whose… animal books to read to a partner. Remind them that their partner should be able to answer “5 Ws” questions and retell the story after he or she has read it with their partner. |
| Word Work | Have students engage in various activities that help them recognize, spell, and use correctly the words “WHO” or “WHOSE”: arranging magnetic letters on a tray, practicing writing on personal white boards, or physical cut-and-paste cloze sentences. |
| Work on Writing | Have students choose a body part of their own to write about from a bank of suggestions that correspond to the body parts covered in the Whose… animal books: eyes, toes, tongue, ears, back, or nose. |
Considerations for Distance or Hybrid Environments:
LevelUp Reader books are ideal for implementing the Daily 5 in a distance or hybrid environment, since they exist on one platform in multiple modalities: electronic, paper-based, and audio. There are also many Spanish language or bilingual versions of the books available. Additionally, book selections can be assigned to individual students and monitored on the LevelUp Reader platform, allowing teachers to connect students to books and monitor their reading proficiency and preferences both physically and electronically.