Daily Five "Shopping" for "Good Fit" Books

We are still working on how to choose "good fit" books during daily five time. We have learned that we choose "good fit" books by looking at the cover, looking at the pictures inside the book, and looking at the text to see if we can read it and understand it. First I modeled for my students how to decide which books in their box they were ready to give up for new ones. Since we are practicing I asked them to decide on two they wanted to give up. Eventually it will be up to them to decide how many books they want to switch out for new ones when they shop.

So far we have only worked with "look books." Today I added readers for them to choose from as well. At this point most of my students are still in the very early stages of learning to read. Fran Kramer's Sparkle Readers are perfect for this early stage of reading. The readers in Fran's first units have two to three word phrases with dots underneath the words to help with one to one match and a strong text to picture match.

Here is an example from Fran's Sparkle Readers (Set #1)

I made class sets of the readers and bagged them together. I explained to my students that more than one of them may want to choose the same reader so I made multiple copies of each. I have other readers in my room and in my literacy room that I can use but it is hard to find books for my readers in the earliest stages. At this point these readers may be a little too easy for some of my kiddos but I am trying to teach the process right now so I am not focused on the exact fit text wise. I would rather start too easy and build confidence than start too hard and frustrate my students. As my students get better at choosing "good fit" books and shopping for new books then I will have them shop in small groups based on their reading level. This will allow me to pull books that I know will be a "good fit" text wise for those students.

I am letting my very high readers choose from other sets of readers and from my chapter book basket. These students shop on their own any time they want right now because they are self-sufficient and I only have two of them.

For now we are going to continue to practice choosing "good fit" books, returning books, and shopping for new ones. Once my students are skilled at choosing from books I have put out, I will let them start shopping from the book baskets on my shelves. I also told them our future goal would be to have 3 books they can read the words in and 2 "look" books.

We reached 15 minutes of stamina for a week but have since lost ground. I had planned to start work on writing this week but have now postponed it till next week. I need us to consistently read for 15 minutes before moving on.