How to Start Daily Five in Your Kinder Classroom - Part 4

Hi friends!  Happy Sunday evening.  I wanted to share more about Daily Five in Kindergarten - in particular - how to start this wonderful management system in your classroom. 

I previously posted the first three {huge} steps to getting your Daily Five in place.  You can find those posts here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

In part three of our journey, I posted about building stamina.  This begins on the third day of school and continues until a predetermined number of reading minutes.  Though, your students are building stamina as their "work", you will still teach mini-lessons to help your students know more about expectations in the classroom.  One mini lesson that is a "must do" is how to choose books from your classroom library.

The Sisters recommend teaching good fit books with shoes.  I started out our lesson by showing my kiddos one of our new favorite books from the first week of school:

I stated to my class that I love my shoes just like Pete and that I brought some of my shoes to show them.

I then pulled out three pairs of shoes that have different purposes.

I held up each pair and asked my students, "What do you think {Mrs. Crowder} uses these shoes for?"  Once they provided responses for each pair, then I asked questions like, "Would you go running in house slippers?" etc...

Then I explained that shoes have different purposes just like our books have different purposes.

Then I showed my students our chart that is now hung in our classroom library and we went over each of the steps to choose a book and related that to the shoes I showed them.

Do I like it? - This one is pretty explanatory.  Does the reader like what the book is about?  You can compare this to liking the shoes you wear.

Does it fit? - Can you read the pictures and understand what's going on in the story?  Is it too easy or too hard?  You can compare this to the fact that you cannot fit into your student's shoes and they can't fit into your shoes.

Does it help me? - Is this the right book for what I want to learn about?  Compare this to shoes help you do different jobs like running, dancing, or lounging. 

The next day we read this book:

It's about a dog who enjoys many different shoes.  We then recalled our lesson for choosing Good Fit Books from the day before.  We also discussed our classroom policy for when it was okay to check out books from our classroom library and how many books were allowed in our book boxes at one time.

In The Daily Five book, The Sisters call the strategy I PICK, which is an acronym.  Here is an I PICK poster:

You can see on the poster what each of the letters in the acronym stand for.  I loved using this acronym when I taught second grade.  It helped my students a lot when choosing books.  Here is a You Tube video with the I PICK strategy being sung by second graders:

Though I loved this acronym for my second graders, I found that it was too wordy and the "K" ( I know most of the words) was not kinder friendly for the majority of the class on the second week of school.  I have found the Good Fit Books poster really helped my K class this year.

So there is how you teach how to choose good fit books.  Keep building stamina and teaching mini lessons.  Some other mini-lessons include how to care for books, how to use your book doctor, and what to do during Read to Self if there is an interruption like a telephone call, unexpected visitor, etc.  I have other mini-lesson ideas on my Part 3 post.

Next time I will post about what to do once you have reached your desired number of minutes of reading.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Enjoy your week!