Word Work

Daily Five is probably one of my least favorite parts of the day. For those of you that are not familiar with Daily Five, it is another name for our structured small group, guided reading time. Students are put into 5 different reading groups depending on their reading level using the Fountas & Pinnell scale. During Daily Five we have 5 centers that groups rotate through. The ultimate goal is that each group with get to each station every day. The stations are: Read to Self, Read to Partner, Teacher Table, Word Work, and Work on Writing. This is to promote strong literacy, reading, writing and independence skills. While the concept is great and I love the idea behind it, for some reason it is a bit chaotic in our classroom. I love that it allows for differentiation but I find myself constantly redirecting students during this time, taking away from my time with the students at the Teacher Table.

One part of Daily Five is word work. I love this station but this could be the reason why it gets a bit noisy in our classroom during this time. For me, word work should be something other than a paper and pencil. I feel that word work should be a game or activity to promote a specific literacy or phonics skill that is engaging to students. There are plenty of great word work worksheets that many of my students enjoy doing during Daily Five, but I like to give my class the option to play a word work game one in a while. I have made many games for my class, but here is one that is our class favorite.

We call it Fried Eggs. The object is for students to work together to flip over eggs- with a spatula of course. The eggs all have words on them that follow a specific spelling pattern. For example, we have a set of eggs that have words on them with either -ch, -sh, or -th. It is their job to read the word on the egg out loud and decide which frying pan it belongs in. The frying pans are also labeled with each digraph. Generally I will swap out the eggs each week with new eggs that have words that follow each week's spelling pattern.