Daily 5 and Maths Rotations

So far this term, I have tried a variety of Daily 4 (Yes not 5!) and reading groups. After completing all my students reading benchmarks, I had to change my groups in order to properly group them by ability. At first, I only had 5 groups (One of these groups is an intervention group) but now I have 6 in order to keep the groups with relatively low numbers as I have 23 students.

My two lower groups complete work from the absolutely amazing Ready2Read programs from The Moffatt Girls (click here to find the units), one group is working through level 1, while the other is working through level 2. Here is a picture of the display board my lowest group is working on.

Their confidence in reading has gone through the roof since starting this program and I cannot believe the progress they are making!!

 My Daily 5 looks like this:

Word Work - Spelling activities. This week students are cutting out letters from magazines to make their spelling lists.

 Read to Self - Same as normal. Students have a bookmark with their decoding strategies on them for easy reference

Read to Someone - Students read Readers' Theatre scripts in preparation for a performance. Great for practicing oral language, fluency and expression. 

Fluency - Instead of Listen to Reading, I read to my students twice a day for about ten mins. So I added the rotation of fluency. My lower kids work on Cara Carroll's 'Rock Your Fluency' packet, which they are loving! I had a proud teacher moment today when one of my littlies, who has needs, successfully completed level 1 cards in under a minute! He was so proud of himself I could have cried! Find it here. My higher kids read fluency passages and time themselves. 

Work On Writing- Students wrote a recount of their weekend. They actually asked to do this which was a pleasant surprise!

My maths groups have also changed this week! I was killing myself trying to provide different activities for all the groups when I read Reagan Tunstall's Guided Math blog post (I love this woman!!) That post inspired me to start more structured activities and actually have kids rotating! I know this sounds completely obvious but for some reason it just wasn't happening. Today we went through the activities and the kids had a go at some of them. Most of the activities are from Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits. My stations are as follows:

Maths Facts - Basic maths facts like addition and subtraction

Rev up your revision! - Revision activities from units we have previously completed

Maths Notebooks - Also called maths journals, my kids absolutely go crazy for these!

Maths Games - Self explanatory but usually aligned with the current focus

Teacher Time - Here I can give groups intervention or extension activities. 

While this post is simply stuff veteran teachers have been doing for years, as a first year I love reading blog posts about what teachers actually do in their rotations, so I hope this helps :)