Color Your World to Improve Comprehension

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

Learning through color helps students organize and remember what they read. We use highlighters to help students find the key words in the text and annotate their notes so they can create "text based" arguments when they write argumentative essays. Colors make the words come alive.

Our school is a vibrant, international community of students striving to develop their skills to become independent learners and productive global citizens.

Many of our English Language Learners are refugee students, what educators call "students with interrupted education." These students need intensive literacy and content instruction to help them succeed in school. Over 20% of our students are English Language Learners, 16% have special needs, 20% are Asian, 26% are Black, 49% are Hispanic and 4% are White. Our school is a high poverty school with over half the population qualifying for free school lunch. In ninth grade 70% of students earned enough credit for admission to tenth grade. In tenth grade, the number dropped to 53%. As our students progress through school we would like to give them the tools so their grades will rise and they will be motivated and prepared to graduate and continue through to college.

My Project

I am requesting highlighters to help our students decode what they read. I work in the library media center and I collaborate with many teachers and many different classes. All of the classes have one thing in common: students must be able to understand what they read in order to engage with the text. Highlighters will help them underline key terms, annotate the information that they will later comment upon or write a response to. The textual information they research will then be used in different formats, according to teacher and student preference. Some students create slide shows, some create oral presentations and some are writing essays. All require students to "cite evidence from the text." Using highlighters in contrasting colors also help students compare and contrast fact from opinion. Students will be able to meet the common core standards for reading by "reading closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical statements..."(CCSS.ELA R.1)

Our students will benefit by using these highlighters to color their world.

Through using color we hope their comprehension and decoding will improve. Many of our students come from war torn countries. Using these highlighters will teach them skills they can use in the future to decode and comprehend text. In order to graduate our students must pass state exams. The better their reading comprehension skills, the better they will perform on standardized tests.