Planning

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been doing a lot of reading this summer.  Some of it YA and some of it teaching books.  To be honest, I've only read one adult book this summer and only because I was determined to get through it because I had started it about 3 times and never had the time to finish it.  With all my reading this summer my goal has been to read books that I can recommend to the boys in my class.  I can recommend any book to girls because I've read most of them, but I found myself at a loss last year at talking about books to my boys aside from RL Stine books which I read all of them when I was younger.  Let me tell you, I'm so glad I've focused my summer on boys' books!  It's such a hidden genre full of adventure, questionable actions and fascinating characters!  I venture to say I've enjoyed boys' books more than the typical girly love stories out there. 

With that being said, I started to do some planning today while at my study group meeting which wound up being semi-boring.  I think the way I'm going to make sure that they have undivided time to read and write each week is to make a schedule.  What I'm struggling with is do I do the Daily 5 like I did last year?  My students did like it, or do I just have them read on those days (monday, wednesday and friday and also after independent writing on Tuesday/Thursday)?  I also created Bloom's folders for students to take their reading and transfer it into another product and move through the Bloom's taxonomy levels.  Last year, that was my work on writing about reading Daily.  I'm leaning towards still doing the Dailies but allowing the students more choice and a checklist of some sort for them to track that they've done each daily once a week.  I've never done this in the 2 years that I've done the Daily 5, but I think I want to try it.  I want to give them more choice and I think they're in 6th grade they can handle it.  Instead of 5 though I'm thinking of 4-Read to Self, Read to Someone/Listen to Reading, Work on Writing about Reading and Word Work.  I combined read to someone and listen to reading because not everyone likes to listen to CDs and I don't have that many.  I also didn't do word work last year instead I did RIT work.  I am thinking maybe I'll do the word work with their RITs and have students practice the academic language that is suggested at each RIT.  I'm still on the fence on that one.  Maybe I could still just call it RIT Word Work and then my principal knows that I'm working on RIT goals?  That may work!  Ahh I need to make some decisions!