Today, I wanted to share with you the components of my daily review. For context, I am in a year 1 class at a school where daily review is compulsory, and so is the inclusion of certain elements.
I know it can seem daunting when you learn about daily reviews and try to start implementing them. But the trick is to start simple and add elements in as you and your students grow more confident with it.
My daily review starts with a revision of sounds. At the start of the year, we were reviewing all the main 'alphabet sounds' (forgive me if there is a better term for it I am currently forgetting), but now, as we move towards the next phase of the phonics code, we will move to having around ten sounds we are reviewing each week.
Next, we move to segmenting, and we segment about 10 words. These words contain the sounds we have just reviewed. If I had more time up my sleeve, I have it that one sound appears at a time and we usually add an action to it as we say it e.g. hopping or punching for each sound.
We then repeat those same words but just read them. Again, I add a movement to this like a star jump or a kick. These three steps usually go pretty quickly, but I do stop to remind students of certain things occasionally, e.g. if one of our sounds is 'ck', I might review the spelling generalisation that 'ck' is used in single syllable words with a short vowel.
The next step is our choral read. As our school uses PLD for our phonics/spelling program, I have used their dictation passages for our choral read. But last year, I would write a non-fiction passage on something linked to what we were learning about, e.g. in HASS or Technology. I loved doing it that way as I could tie in vocabulary words and link knowledge concepts together or lay background knowledge for an upcoming topic. I read the passage first Mon-Wed, and then students read with me. I slowly fade out my voice over the week so that by Friday they are reading it without me.
We then review some high-frequency words we had previously covered and looked at the 2-3 new ones for the next fortnight. These are according to the PLD scope and sequence. We read the word, use it in a sentence, segment the word, examine the tricky/heart parts, etc.
Lastly, we do dictation. Again, because we are using PLD I do their dictation passages. As my class is quite weak, we are currently doing one sentence from the dictation passage a day. Last year, I would do sentences that contained words from our segmenting and reading section (and therefore also review the sounds again). During the first term, I showed the sentence first, and we went through it together. Then, students write it, and we look at the sentence together again. Eventually, we will move to students writing it without seeing it first. I repeat it for them as often as needed and move on when most students have finished it. We use mini whiteboards for this task and to incorporate handwriting, I have line magnets (dotted thirds) from Magnificent Learning Supplies.
We follow up daily review with Heggerty, so some of the concepts you might see in a daily review are absent because they get covered in Heggerty. (Heggerty is a program for phonemic awareness).
There are many other concepts you can include in a daily review, like syntax, grammar, morphology, etc., but for my year 1 class at the moment, this is where we are at.
I change out the main components of the daily review each Monday. So we do the same sounds, words and choral reading passage for the whole week. The dictation sentence is the only one that changes daily. My PowerPoint is very plain, with a white background and words in our school font. I try to keep the whole process to 10 minutes.