It was my first day of college and I was sitting in my first class, Human Anatomy and Physiology. The teacher was introducing the syllabus, but my attention was on the stunningly handsome guy sitting across from me. After finding out we had a mutual acquaintance, Mark, I wrote to Mark to get information about the guy I had a mad crush on. He and I continued writing back and forth for a year (email hadn't been invented yet), and instead of falling in love with the crush, I fell in love with and married Mark in September, 1980. 

Something similar happened in my professional life 21 years ago when I was being asked to teach a new basal series. I was dissatisfied because the one-story/40-worksheet-pages-per-week program was failing to meet the needs of the majority of my first graders. When I spotted Gail coming down the hallway on parent night (she was there to meet with her daughter's teacher, but taught at another school in the district) I said, "Gail, I'm not happy with this reading program. How are you doing with it?"

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper and responded, "Oh, I don't do it."
"You don't do it!?! What are you doing instead?"
"Come to my classroom tomorrow after school and I'll show you."

It was there, sitting in one of her little first-grade chairs, that I first learned about Daily 5, another love affair that has lasted ever since.

If you learn more about Daily 5, you will surely fall in love with it, too. That's the purpose of this week's tip. Every video, article, and download this week is chosen to help you become intimately acquainted with this fabulous structure. With Daily 5, students are highly engaged, motivated, and invested in their own learning, and teachers gain the time they need to help all students, whether they are behind or exceeding standards, make significant gains. What's not to love?

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