Our school is a new, inquiry-based elementary school in Brooklyn, NY and our young students have a daily 60-minute reading workshop time. In order to engage fully in our developmentally appropriate literacy curriculum, our students need books that will support them along their literacy pathway.
Our student body is as diverse as the neighborhood in Brooklyn where we are located.
Our students come from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and some of them speak languages other than English. In addition to racial and ethnic diversity, our students come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.
We are an inclusive school and we welcome all types of learners with open arms. All of our classrooms have one general education teacher and one special education teacher to support the diverse needs of our students.
We are an inquiry-based elementary school that believes in making sure that all students are able to explore the world around them by engaging in real-life inquiry projects. We focus on projects that involve sustainability and the arts, and we use the surrounding community as our classroom.
As a brand new school started by three teachers, we do not have a large budget to purchase all of the materials needed in our classroom.
My Project
During our Emergent Storybooks Unit of Study, our classroom will be set up to mimic early home literacy experiences that may or may not be familiar to our students. Since the first day of school, we have been reading predictable stories aloud to the class in an attempt for the students to begin to remember the stories being read and use some of this storybook language as we read. We call these predictable books "emergent storybooks."
The bulk of this unit is based upon the work of Elizabeth Sulzby and her Classification Scheme for emergent storybook reading stories tend to go (story grammar), how to read with expression and use literary language, and how to think about character and setting. This unit builds upon our previous literacy work by including more lessons that encourage students to read and talk about books with reading partners. Students will also have an opportunity to build reading stamina by reading independently for longer periods of time.
Your contribution will ensure that our diverse group of kindergarten students will have access to engaging and developmentally appropriate emergent storybooks such as Caps for Sale and The Little Red Hen.
These books will be shared across our two kindergarten classrooms. Teachers will read these books aloud to the kindergarteners and the children will also have the chance to read these books during reading workshop. This set of emergent storybooks will be used for years to come and will help to get our young readers off to a great start!
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