onorsChoose is built on the belief that motivated teachers know their students' needs best. At this Web site, such teachers can design innovative educational experiences that profoundly affect student achievement. The stories below illustrate how students benefit when inspired teachers connect with citizen-philanthropists.

Chicago
Classroom Puppet Theatre

New York
New Words, New Worlds
"I read ahead! I couldn't help it!"
Abundant Paper, Limitless Futures
Furnishing Imagination
Making Minds Bloom
Kings, Queens, and Champions

North Carolina
Our Friends Show Us What We Can Do
Patterns of History, Quilting a Community
Queens Creek Elementary Aloft
Solving the Problems of Math

San Francisco Bay Area
Be Our Buddy—Help Us Make Buddy Bins!
Take It To Your Seat!

"The most important goal I set for my students each year is to have them reading by the second quarter," a first grade teacher wrote in her "Classroom Puppet Theatre" proposal to DonorsChoose.org. "This is a tough, but extremely rewarding task."

With the help of a concerned individual, the teacher was able to fulfill this goal and provide her students with a creative and meaningful way to express their ideas, imagination and love of learning. A puppet theatre, puppets and cameras help the students connect with story book characters and make inferences and links between the story and their own lives. The students' reenactment of the stories using the puppet theatre also improves their reading comprehension in a fun and interesting way.

"I always want to provide the best education I can for my students and it is so hard to get them everything they need," wrote the teacher. "I spend so much of my own money that I have barely any left over to pay the bills! This is the first time I have written a grant and I honestly did not think someone would be so kind to help. When I saw that you did help, I immediately started to cry."

The classroom puppet theatre has helped this teacher provide her students with an amazing learning opportunity — an opportunity that will surely benefit many children now and in the future. When asked who helped make this possible, one student replied, "It came from a nice and gentle person when our teacher went on the internet."

A second grade teacher in a South Bronx school wrote DonorsChoose.org describing a familiar frustration. "My students receive vocabulary and spelling words and writing activities every day for homework... I have only two dictionaries in my classroom." Much time was spent waiting for one of the two dictionaries to circulate.

Nor did most of the children have dictionaries or thesauruses at home to develop their independent learning skills. These students' efforts to become fluent writers were hampered by lacking the reference books necessary to find new ways to express themselves, describe the world around them, and experience the delight of playing with words.

The word "thesaurus" means "treasure house" in its original Greek, but these children might never have come to understand why if a woman from Los Angeles had not responded to their teacher's proposal, "Dictionaries are Needed!" With a generous gift of $802, she gave 24 children a gift for life, enabling each child to have a personal dictionary and thesaurus, to be used both at school and at home.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda, in his "Ode to the dictionary", wrote of his thrilling discovery as a child that dictionaries were anything but dull books. "Dictionary," he wrote, "guide just one of your thousand hands, just one /of your thousand emeralds/to my mouth,/ to the point of my pen, to my inkwell/at the right/moment."

Thanks to a donor from Los Angeles, children from the South Bronx will be able to give their own gifts to the world.

At Wings Academy in the Bronx, a class of thirty-seven "amazing" eleventh-graders fell in love with books, thanks to a literature course that presented novels and memoirs with the theme of immigration. Students no longer saw reading books as an assigned task, but as a revelation. As they read such works as Richard Wright's classic novel, Black Boy, and Mexican-American legends, they became "inspired readers," rushing to class, exclaiming "I read ahead! I couldn't help it!"

In turn, these newly inspired readers inspired their teacher. She went to DonorsChoose.org and submitted the proposal, "Immigration Novels as Summer Reading Gifts." This teacher wanted to present a book to each of her students at the end of the year, "inscribed with a personal note to the recipient explaining why I chose that particular book."

A recent college graduate funded the student project and the books were delivered to Wings Academy. "This was for some students," she explained in her thank-you letter, "the first adult novel they'd ever owned." The class's delight in the gift books spilled over in their thank-you notes. "I will cherish the book!" wrote one young man. Some of the students were so proud of their books that they brought them to school on the last day before vacation, "carried somewhat conspicuously in their hands or back pockets, as they carry their best accessories."

In Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, an English as a Second Language teacher is working with a first grade class whose native tongues include Cantonese, Haitian Creole, Russian, and Spanish. She has struggled to establish a well-equipped classroom, but she cannot supply the amount and variety of paper a first grade classroom needs. "Paper," she writes, "is the most basic supply in the classroom…We need all sorts of paper-paper to write on, doodle with, paper to tear up for art projects, paper to glue and cut."

This is even more crucial for non-native children, she explains, who may not yet be able to find the words they want to express themselves, but can use drawing and paper constructions to communicate creatively. A wealth of paper lets young children learn that they can make mistakes and start fresh-a crucial inner development.

This teacher was forced to hoard her classroom paper supply, until a woman from Massachusetts supplied this precious resource by funding, "First Grade ESL Class Needs PAPER." The words of her thank-you letter give an image of a changed classroom: "Since having the proposal funded I freely and generously reach for construction paper, writing paper, drawing paper, etc., whenever we need it. You made a mistake? Get a new paper! Explore! Express yourself!"

A donor has not just supplied a material need, but given this class an important symbol of the abundance of their own ideas, and of their futures.

A kindergarten teacher working in a trailer-like annex building found her students distracted during their story hour, because her entire class could never get a simultaneous view of the day's chosen book. The stories were disrupted for the children, and the brilliantly colored illustrations appreciated less, because many of the children couldn't see the book, and were never able to enjoy a truly shared reading experience.

In her DonorsChoose.org proposal, "I Can't See the Book!" the teacher requested a piece of furniture that would enable her to display the book to the entire class along with a writing board that would enable her to highlight vocabulary words, plot patterns, and record the children's responses to the tales. The proposal was funded by a writer of children's stories!

The teacher wrote her donor describing the day the equipment arrived: "I quickly cleared up the old cluttered space where I stored the big books so that they would have a great surprise when they came back from lunch…my children actually cheered to see their new easel and when we had story time my children who usually complained were able to see the book finally….they were so excited to see that people really do care and there is hope in the kindness of others."

An enterprising first-grade teacher in a hard-pressed school applied to a City Park's program called Growing Gardens. Her class was accepted into the program in which the students would be supervised in planting and maintaining a garden adjacent to their school.

Her urban youngsters were delighted with the unfamiliar rhythms of planting, weeding and harvesting. They were developing a new range of experience, powers, and vocabulary, too. Their enthusiasm, and the accelerated pace at which they were learning, motivated their teacher to make the garden the focus of mastering other skills. She submitted "Growing Gardens Art Project" to DonorsChoose.org.

In this proposal, the teacher devised an art program in which the children would become diarists of their garden, practicing sustained observation through sketches and journals, like real botanists, combining the methods of literacy, art, and science. But her school had no budget for the necessary art supplies.

A husband and wife in Manhattan were entranced by the possibilities of the project, and came to the rescue. In funding this proposal at DonorsChoose.org, they provided sketchbooks, smocks, and watercolors, but they also extended a lesson the children had already begun to learn about the nature of community. Because of these donors, "remarkable scientists, artists, and writers," like their garden, have a chance to flower.

In Washington Heights, a high school teacher who was an amateur chess player had a passing idea. He thought he might bring in his own chess board one afternoon to see if he could interest any of his students in learning the game. The response was unexpected and overwhelming. Within a few weeks, some fifty students signed up, eager for lessons, urging the teacher to find a way to start a permanent chess club.

It was a phenomenon, the teacher said, that he had never seen: students refusing to leave school after class hours were over. He applied to DonorsChoose.org for enough boards, pieces, and manuals to meet the students' demands. A New York woman, impressed by the fact that the source of this proposal was the students themselves, decided to fund "Chess Club."

The donor was even more impressed when she received the club's response. Their freewheeling letters ranged from the playfully competitive boasts of rival champions, to the ironic, "Believe it or not, you made our school more fun", to the poignant, "At least we know that people think about us." There were stories of friends who had never enjoyed school, but now found themselves in the grip of chess fever. Many of the letters spoke of how much the students appreciated the security and good company of after school extracurricular activities, and how few options there were. The young faces in the photographs displayed intensity, delight, concentration, effort, and triumph—every player a winner.

Third graders at the Dixon Elementary School in Holly Ridge are discovering what a great poet once learned for himself centuries ago. "Our friends show us what we can do," wrote Goethe, a lesson that a North Carolina teacher and DonorsChoose.org sponsors are bringing home to students today.

Research on literacy skills shows that students who read aloud and listen to stories substantially improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary. But the fact that Dixon Elementary is in a district with many two-income families meant that finding time for read-aloud hours at home was often a challenge.

The teacher devised an ingenious solution-to make read-aloud time as portable as a picnic. She planned a read-aloud backpack for students to take home, containing a cassette player with blank cassettes, a variety of books matching each child's reading level, and a small stuffed animal to share the pleasure of the stories. In this way, the students could develop their skills in independent reading, have a record in their own voices of their growing fluency, and embrace the continuity of learning. In addition, the next groups of Dixon third-graders could make use of the same materials and methods.

DonorsChoose.org sponsors used their own listening skills to make the project possible. Dixon students are not only improving reading skills through storybooks, but they are discovering how to make their own stories come alive, and realizing how many friends hear their voices.

A social studies teacher in a rural school in Duplin County was searching for a way to give her seventy seventh and eight graders a creative and personal experience of their North Carolina Antebellum Social Studies material. African-American craftspeople in North Carolina had been central to the state's artisanal and artistic heritage, as basketweavers, blacksmiths, makers of fine furniture, and museum quality quilts. Their reputation for excellence was so high that when George Vanderbilt commissioned Biltmore, his 250 room French Renaissance chateau in Asheville, in 1889, the great structure became a testimony to African-American craftspeople.

The teacher wanted her students to learn about the lives of the craftsmen, and their impact on North Carolina history, but she also wanted her students to have a direct experience of becoming craftspeople themselves. She devised a Social Studies quilt project, in which her students would collaborate on the quilt, researching and using traditional patterns created by both African-American slaves and freed people. DonorsChoose.org donors provided felt, fabrics, glue and glue guns, needles, threads, and rods. But above all, they helped a teacher put history into the hands of her students.

An art teacher at Queens Creek on the Outer Banks was struck by the personal pride her students took in the anniversary of the first flight by the Wright Brothers. Her students' enthusiasm inspired her to channel their curiosity in several different, but related directions. First, she asked for funding for a visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art, where the students would view an exhibition dedicated to artists' interpretation of flight.

The students would then be asked to research the flight technology of their choice, from hot air balloons to rockets, using their research to design their own flight machines, and incorporating both words and images. Finally, the students would create tiles based on the images of their flight machines, making their designs permanent, and learning all stages of tile-making from design to glazing and firing. A final element of the project would be the decoration of a table with their finished tiles, a table that would then become their gift to the entire school.

The materials were simple, a trip, unglazed tiles, adhesive caulking, and grout; but using these workaday components, the teacher devised a project that combined science, history, art, community service, and a vision of adventure-and donors helped Queens Creek students find their wings.

A second grade teacher in Fayetteville found her class was less than captivated by mathematics presented only through their textbooks and workbooks. She wanted to find a way to involve her students in learning math through opening their imaginations to the mathematical concepts that surrounded them in their everyday lives. Through her research she found a novel solution: she turned to literature and language. She designed a classroom library of stories that illustrated mathematical techniques and problems as developed by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. She asked DonorsChoose.org donors to underwrite the permanent collection of books for the use of generations of her school's second graders.

Through stories by distinguished writers such as Greg Tang and Eve Merriam, her students learned the concept of symmetry illustrated by kites, multiplication through rhyming word games, adding and subtracting through the story of a family choosing a site for a vacation. Learning that making cakes depends partly on skills with fractions gave them a taste for math. And through a dedicated teacher's search for a fresh approach and the support of generous donors, they learned a lasting lesson in the art of problem solving.

A second grade teacher in San Jose wanted to help her ten lowest-performing students improve their math and reading skills. Every other day after school, these ten students stayed an extra hour to work with their teacher. She quickly realized this group effort was not providing the individualized attention each struggling student needed. She needed to provide her students with ownership of their learning so they could progress at their own pace. But how...? And then the solution came to her—she could find a personal tutor for each student!

She recruited 10 responsible 5th graders to buddy with each 2nd grader. As the tutoring began, she found an inordinate amount of time was spent directing the students in organizing their papers, folders, readers, workbooks etc. This problem proved harder to solve. The students needed a color-coded and grade-leveled learning system so they could self-monitor their progress. But where in the world would she find the funds for this with her limited classroom budget?

The very next week at a teacher's meeting, she learned about DonorsChoose.org and submitted Help Us Make Buddy Bins!. Less than a month later, she and her students received the bins to create the needed learning system. This project has provided the students with more than bins—it has provided them with motivation to learn. With the help of their buddies and their bins, the students' materials are organized, their buddies are teaching, and they are learning!

Thanks to independent learning centers, 16 first-graders in Richmond, California, are having a ball while becoming life-long learners! This group of students is working hard to gain primary language (Spanish) literacy skills before they transition to English, so that they become literate and can learn in both languages. Their teacher recognized that developing independent learning skills would benefit them throughout their lives regardless of who was teaching them. She also wanted to be sure her students were learning at all times in the classroom — even if she was not working directly with them. To achieve these two goals, she set aside workshop time each day for independent and small group learning.

She found that trying to get "16 exuberant 6-year-olds" to independently read or write was a bit like "herding cats"! However, when she requested and received a set of "take it to your seat" learning centers for the class, workshop time became her students' favorite time of day.

Now, instead of running all over the room meeting all-too-briefly with all the children, she can spend her time focused on a small group, giving them the attention they need because the other students are intently engaged in putting together a rhyming puzzle, creating a graph of multi-colored star fish, finding the missing vowel to label a familiar picture, or completing any one of the 50 other centers in the set—all without her intervention. She can now give each child individual attention at all times by assigning a center targeted to that child's particular needs.

These wonderful, energetic students are well on their way to mastering first grade standards and becoming life-long learners, all while having a ball!