Gosh, in my visits to school I'd have to say that I think most teachers spend too much time on "dailies" (DOL, MUG Shots, etc.). Some that I've seen are so involved and convoluted that it takes close to 15 minutes to get through. So I'd have to say the main culprit in this is probably not the teacher, but some sort of mandated buy-in to a scripted program.
I think I've mentioned on this list that I'm big on teamwork. So in my classroom kids would work with their group on the "daily". I always did my own content because I could tailor it to the problems I was seeing and also so I could make them short and to the point. So for the week I'd let them know that we were working on "restrictive appositives" or "dependent clauses" and how these are important to good writing. So we'd have small examples for them to fix at start of class. On Friday I have them write at least one sentence with the focused used incorrectly and one correctly. I'm not sure how/where I picked up the incorrect strategy, but I really liked it. Also I might ask them to explain why 8th graders might have trouble with the concept/focus issue. I worry about scripted programs that are done "in order". You know if it's February we're working on helping verbs. This is were Math people do a much better job as the "Math Minute" is almost always related to the concepts currently being worked on in class. In terms of dailies - *less is more *it has to relate - misuse, projects, genres that we work on, etc. *get kids talking about it *if they can explain how to do it wrong, they will probably know how to do it right. Keith Mack [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.literacyworkshop.org _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
