Stamina

The Daily Five is part of our everyday classroom life and learning. Most children have the stamina to participate positively and consistently but there is one child who finds this very difficult, particularly after a long weekend or holiday break or after returning from illness.
After spending some sessions redirecting this child and some ignoring him, I have concluded that redirecting him disturbs my teaching group and ignoring him means he achieves nothing and disturbs people around him. I may need to seat him near me and operate a reward consequence system for work achieved.

I have also discovered that there are two or three  others who look as though they are participating while achieving very little, especially in Work on Writing.  I have let these students know that I will be monitoring their output daily until they are able to self-monitor.

Relaxed and Focused

We have adopted the mantra 'Relaxed and Focused' in the classroom and remind ourselves about it every day. Alongside this we are trying to 'trim the fat' and make the most of learning time. Trimming the fat is cutting down the time spent on transitions, thinking carefully about what is real learning and what is busy work, ensuring children understand what to do etc etc.
You may think that trimming the fat is incompatible with remaining relaxed and focused but in practice the two concepts work well together. Having a relaxed and focused atmosphere helps children who are anxious, while trimming the fat encourages us all to keep focused on learning.

The Daily 5

We have made a great start with The Daily 5. I have followed the sequence faithfully and students are now able to say what Read to Self looks and sounds like, what they will be doing and what the teacher will be doing. More importantly, they can do it independently! We will  keep moving through the start-up lesson sequence over the next few weeks.

The start of the year has, as always, been full of stuff like stationery, triathlon and testing so our class next step is to find our daily rhythm.