Work Boxes and Daily Five

As I was doing research for this next school year, I was intrigued by the idea of Daily Five, which is often used in kindergarten classrooms.  Daily Five encourages kids to work on reading, writing, and spelling through five different daily activities (hence the name).


Free Chalkboard Labels can be downloaded here.

Work boxes are very common homeschooling tool.  I've been dabbling in them for the past few years (I even wrote two posts about them already this summer- a planner here and the labels here).  Now that I have my curriculum sorted out, I think I know that I want my work boxes to look like.


The paper drawers are our work boxes.  This shelf is for the things the kids will share and the things that the boys will do apart from Dragonfly.

1- Read Aloud: our current novel for whole group reading time
2- Math: number work for the boys
3- Skills: scissors, pinching, handwriting, etc
4- Calendar: storage
5- Notebooks: interactive notebook materials
6- Science: materials for our theme that week


This shelf is Dragonfly's materials.  I'd like her to be able to work independently through the boxes eventually.

7- Math Games
- Horizons K math workbook
math tiles (matching, etc)
monster flash cards
graphing with dice
math counters
zookeeper's day (telling time)
100 chart
school day (telling time)
10-frame games
roll and cover
pirate clip and count
counting jewels
bug roll and fill game
                                                        - making teen numbers board

As you can see, there are even more ideas for math games!  It's also very easy to make math games that fit our science theme units.  Small changes can make big differences in the novelty of a game.

8- Word Work Ideas
- curves and sticks for building letters (free)
- Thanksgiving spelling game (free)
- rainbow words spelling (free)
- magic words (white crayon writing)
- black light words (highlighter)
- tiles (one of my summer projects)
- juggling CVC words (free)
- salt box (using finger or brush)
- magnetic letters
- bananagram worksheets (free)
- safari spelling and math challenge (free)
- secret message (finding beginning sounds to spell words)
- poke pin words
- CVC dice (free)
- word family rimes chart (free)
- monster word sorting (free)

Our CVC word cards came from Miss Giraffe.  We'll start with these for rime words (words with the same ended).

The idea for our Sight Word cards came from Learning with Mrs. Langley.  I used her idea of rainbow words and made my own set of smaller cards.  Her cards can be bought at Teachers Pay Teachers. The printable list of Fry words can be found here.

As you can see, there are tons of ideas for word work.  And, thanks to Pinterest, I'll never run out of novel ways to teach phonics and sight words.

9- Listen to Reading Ideas
- parent/sibling/adult reads to child (a list of things kids can do while they listen)
- audiobooks with headphones
- read-to-me stories on device
- youtube videos of people reading books
- free QR codes for kids books







10- Writing
This is mainly going to be copywork and free writing as she gets more proficient and reading and writing.  You can read about my resource binder from writing here.

Here are a few more helpful things that I found to incorporate through our year:

how to write like a scientist
use a spaceman to separate words
opinion worksheets ($- I like __ because __.)
this is how I write the first day of school
free journal paper
rainbow writing (tracing different colors)
write from your heart

11- Read to Self
I think that most of these books are going to be related to our science theme of the week.  The Read to Self part of the day will be a chance for her to take a break from learning to read and to just enjoy the idea of books again.  She can look at pictures and tell the story.  These books can then be part of our listen to reading time.





12- Practice Reading
I don't really have anything to add to this list.  Basically, it's just mom and child or dad and child working on reading aloud books.  Or perhaps working together on sight word flashcards or rimes.



To keep track of all my themes and good ideas for the boxes, I made my own planner pages.  I'm going to put them in a binder.  You can download the planner pages with the work boxes written in or a blank planner page.











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