Today, I wanted to share with you the components of my daily review. For context, I am in a year 1 class with the majority of students at or above level.
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. I also start the year off with less and increase as soon get quicker at the elements already included.
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 we review about 10 sounds. These sounds are the same every day of the week.
Next, we move to segmenting, and we segment about 10 words relating to the sounds we just reviewed. Each sound of the word appears one at a time (clicked through by me) and then a star to show the word has been completed and we say the whole word. If I think my students need to move during this, we will add a movement like 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. We do one to three sentences 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.
The last element of my daily reviews revolves around sentences structure. It changes every few weeks but for Term 1 Weeks 5-10 we do sentences stems for because, but and so. (I don't do this on Monday because Monday's are always a little bit busier in the morning). In future I will switch it up each day and do one day editing a sentence, one day focusing on parts of speech etc. These will also tie in with the topics we have been learning about. Below you can see how we had been learning about sun safety, reptiles and the past.
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).
I try to keep this process to only 10 minutes a day.