My students need hot plates and 2 types of flasks to be able to distill dirty water into clean, drinking water.
$1,352 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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.
I have never been a stand and lecture sort of educator. My students are always up and moving, sometimes we go for walks around campus as I teach them. I believe engaging activities foster learning, so we like to have a lot of fun. Sometimes they won't even realize I'm squeezing knowledge into them!
Mine is a class full of students largely ignored, forgotten or overlooked.
With 80%+ of our school's population living below the poverty line, and just under 80% English learners, we represent a population most fail to have much faith in. Though we are a team of explorers, scientists, and engineers. My students are pushed beyond what they are used to and have been told they are capable of. Unfortunately this year not a single one of my students has a parent who went to college, and that trickles downward, making them lose sight of the value of education at times. For years these kids have just been cycled through the system and moved on. I have had some of them go home crying only to come back the next day with hugs, thanking me for pushing them, thanking me for being the one person who believes that not only can they aspire to greater things, but that they SHOULD. There are some brilliant minds in my class, but nobody encouraging them. I will not let that continue in my class.
My Project
I wanted to join my district's science committee in hopes of not only bringing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to my school, but to reinvent the way we teach science. In doing so, we can take our students, who have always lagged behind in many areas to finally be at the forefront of something. With only a handful of other districts participating in California's Early Implementation of the NGSS, my students have a chance to become cutting edge elementary school scientists and engineers. I am hoping to get scientific hot plates, and two types of flasks needed to set up a distillation process so that my students will be able to actually turn dirty water into drinking water. I will have them develop their own methods for filtering whatever they can out of the water to see how close to pure we can get before we distill. They will learn scientific inquiry, self evaluation, collaborative problem solving, and address multiple NGSS performance tasks in the process.
In talking about careers and the future, I always ask my students the first week of school what their future might hold.
This year I was crushed when after one student said "I can't be a doctor, come on!" and his classmates all agreed. I can't change culture, but my students, who have been conditioned to think they can never be doctors or lawyers, have never been convinced they cannot be engineers, computer programmers, or scientists, so I want to push their curiosities and give them a goal.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Montero and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
