My students need two portable air conditioners, in order to be able to concentrate and read comfortably. Our classroom temperature has been about 100 every afternoon.
$1,019 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.
The best way to improve students' writing is to give them time to read. At the start of every class I play classical music in the background and ask them to read silently for at 15-20 minutes. Students get excited to read in complete freedom and often enter the room asking "Can we read today?"
My classes have a high percentage of Latino students from very low incomes with multiple family households.
Quite often the families are in transition from one culture to another with all of the attendant problems. Alcoholism, drug use, familial abuse, and poverty abound. The children are often left on their own as their parents work long, hard hours to make a better life. Gang involvement is prevalent among the unattended youth, and with little or no discipline from home, they take every opportunity to get into mischief. One of the schools in our district that fits this description has 885 students enrolled in kindergarten through 8th grade, 95% of which are Latino, 60% of whom qualify for free lunches while another 20% to 30% qualify for reduced lunches, my class is very similar. Many of my students are reading well below grade level and giving them time to quietly read for pleasure is not something they have a lot of exposure to. No air conditioning makes it hard to focus/read.
My Project
The temperature in my classroom for the past week has been hovering near 100 degrees any time after about 10 am. Fans blowing makes it hard to hear and it is increasingly difficult for students to focus as their books and papers get blown off the desk. While our office and library have air conditioning, our classrooms do not. As frustration grows, it is natural for them to waste extra time at the water fountain, splash water at each other, even though the water is hot, and lose the enthusiasm for reading and writing that was present when they arrived in the morning when the weather was cooler. My struggling readers are less-inclined to do something difficult in the oppressive heat. As we enter this traditionally warmest time of year in the Bay Area, these students cannot afford to lose another month or two due to the extreme temperature in our classroom. Many of them have no other opportunity to quietly read or work on their writing as their home lives do not focus on literacy.
Donating to this project will be an amazing blessing for my students who will benefit greatly from having a comfortable quiet place to focus on improving their reading and writing skills.
Other schools can cancel classes due to the heat, but my students need every minute in the classroom and all the tools I can give them to keep them progressing toward our goal of closing the learning gap. Keeping the temperature reasonable and the air clean in our classroom is crucial to helping them focus.
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