Daily Five

Daily Five

Background: Daily 5 is a literacy framework that asks teachers to engage in five daily literacy activities: Listen to Reading, Read to Self, Read to Someone, Word Work, and Work on Writing. This is a flexible model, allowing for activities to occur in a block or implemented within other curricular activities. Independent choice of books to read/listen to and writing topics are critical components of the Daily Five. By allowing teachers to assign students a large group of varied texts on the LevelUp platform according to the students’ interests and reading levels—essentially using LevelUp as an electronic “book bin”—and teach them to use the platform themselves, LevelUp lends itself well to student independence. In the sample Daily Five “round” below, students are using a group of six thematically related LevelUp books in a genre study.

Sample Lesson

Grade: 1
Content: ELA
Resources/Materials:
  1. Whose Back Is This?
  2. Whose Eyes Are These?
  3. Whose Nose Is This?
  4. Whose Teeth Are These?
  5. Whose Toes Are Those?
  6. Whose Tongue Is This?
Additional Resources:
  1. https://www.thedailycafe.com/daily-5
  2. https://www.thedailycafe.com/content/research-daily-5-basis-0
  3. https://www.thedailycafe.com/content/sample-schedules

Listen to Reading

Choose one of the Whose… animal books for a group read-aloud, engaging in answering text-based questions as a group. Have students predict the answer to the questions in the text before turning the page to reveal the answer. Questions should be geared towards helping the students start to identify the characteristics of a nonfiction text: “Are the animals in this book real? How do you know that?”

Read to Self

Have students choose another of the six Whose… animal books to read on their own. Remind them that there are three ways to read a book to yourself: read the words; look at the pictures; turn the pages and retell the story as you go.

Read to Someone

Have students choose another of the six Whose… animal books to read to a partner. Remind them that their partner should be able to answer “5 Ws” questions and retell the story after he or she has read it with their partner.

Word Work

Have students engage in various activities that help them recognize, spell, and use correctly the words “WHO” or “WHOSE”: arranging magnetic letters on a tray, practicing writing on personal white boards, or physical cut-and-paste cloze sentences.

Work on Writing


Have students choose a body part of their own to write about from a bank of suggestions that correspond to the body parts covered in the Whose… animal books: eyes, toes, tongue, ears, back, or nose.


Click the attachment below to download a blank Daily Five template.

Considerations for Distance or Hybrid Environments:
LevelUp books are ideal for implementing the Daily Five in a distance or hybrid environment, since they exist on one platform in multiple modalities: electronic, paper-based, and audio. There are also over many Spanish language or bilingual versions of the books available. Additionally, book selections can be assigned to individual students and monitored on the LevelUp platform, allowing teachers to connect students to books and monitor their reading proficiency and preferences both physically and electronically.

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