Daily 5: Listen to Read

Well considering Sandy has hit Maryland full force we did not have school today and we won't be going tomorrow. Who knows about the rest of the week. No school is probably a good thing considering I my kiddos have given me a horrible cold. :-(

Like many others I started using Daily 5 in my classroom this year. I have to say that I love Daily 5!!! Not only do I love it but my kiddos love it too. They count down the minutes until it is time to do Daily 5. Then when it is time to clean up they all start to whine. Out of all the Daily 5 components the one they like the best is Listen to Read.  In my class we have 3 iPods (don't get too excited they are  my old ones) that I have loaded all my books on tape on to.  I also have 2 computers that we use for Listen to Read. Because our school system has put tight restrictions on what we can view at school my teaching buddy and I were having a hard time finding sites that would read books to students and access them at school. A fellow teacher told us that you can download you tube videos and our minds went to work.  We figured out that you tube had hundreds of children's books read by adults and fellow children.  We used savevid.com to download the books we wanted and then put them into a Smartboard file. We open these files at school and we have instant listen to read centers. My only wish now is that I had more computers.  They are easy to manage and the kids love that the pictures move.