Celebrate Black Teachers and Students
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
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Ms. McNulty from Saint Louis MO is requesting supplies through DonorsChoose, the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
My students need Post-Its in different shape, color, and sizes to help capture their thinking in our Readers Workshop.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
Reading is thinking. As a teacher of literacy, this phrase is constantly on my lips and woven into my lessons. Far too often, though, my students reach me believing the opposite - that reading is just eyes moving around on a page. My charge is to make the intangible process of reading tangible.
I have the incredible pleasure of teaching our 5th and 6th grade scholars at SCP, a college-bound charter school in a large city in Missouri.
Our students come from schools all over the city - charter and public - and many of them reach us years behind their peers in more affluent schools. We're proud of our culture surrounding literacy at SCP - the genuine, infectious enthusiasm our students and staff have about reading - and, just two weeks into our school year, I'm already seeing it change my students. Parents are telling me that their sons and daughters never really liked reading before - but that's changing. Students sneak pages of their books while waiting in line, and the excitement before a library trip is palpable.
One of the biggest tasks I face as a teacher of reading is the need to help my students make their thinking concrete - to help them develop strategies and, ultimately, permanent skills such as questioning the text, visualizing, making predictions, inferencing, and identifying important details. My favorite approach is simple - we have colors assigned to each of these skills and use Post-Its to write in our books and in our class notebooks (better known as our External Brains) and to make our thinking concrete. I can see at a glance which students are gaining skill in making inferences by looking at blue Post-Its, and I can note who's struggling more with predictions by glancing at purple Post-Its. Having a huge stockpile of smaller Post-Its is amazingly helpful when it comes to helping all of us grow together. Likewise - large Post-It pads will enable me to share more information with students during lessons and will let students create visuals to support book talks.
These materials will make a huge difference in my students' ability to grow and learn this year, and will help us attain our ambitious reading growth goals - we're aiming for two years' growth for most of my students, and that isn't the sort of growth that just happens without strategies and resources.
Getting reading right - now - for my 5th and 6th grade scholars will put them on a new trajectory academically and personally. Thanks for your support!
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