I have been using the Daily5 with my beginner to intermediate middle school students and have been fairly happy with the results: children who like to read and write. They are finding authors and series they enjoy and are discovering that writing can be a powerful way to communicate with others. I work with my students in a pull out situation.

Recently, though, I’ve been feeling pressure, mostly from myself and a little bit from observing my students, to change up some of what goes on in class so that there are authentic assignments that stretch my students as language learners. More specifically, I’m trying to determine which tasks are useful because they extend and enrich students’ English language development, and which are just busy work and students are finding a chore to complete. The four standard weekly assignments are:

1. Dialogue Journals – running conversation twice/week between my students and myself.
2. Storytelling – about a personally significant event. This also involves listening to other students’ stories, taking notes, and choosing one interesting story to write about.
3. Filling out a graphic organizer about a story the child listened to on the computer.
4. T-chart for read to self which includes writing from the reflection side of the chart.