Shark Club Attacks! Enthusiastic Students Love Learning!
My students need engaging resources to study sharks and create models of sharks.
$251 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.
Do you remember the first time you went on vacation and discovered something new? At my school most of my students have never left our rural county. We work to fill in all the missing gaps in our students basic knowledge in our normal instruction and through our clubs.
I am a proud fifth grade teacher.
Most of my students receive free or reduced priced lunch and about 75% do not speak English at home. This makes my job so much more exciting! I am the one who gets to show my students the world and everything in it. There is nothing better than taking 80 fifth graders to the ocean for the first time! Unfortunately, this lack of background knowledge makes many subjects, especially reading, more difficult. It's hard to understand a book about European Explorers if you have never seen a boat. It's hard to understand the Civil Rights Movement if you've never seen public transportation and your only restaurant experience is McDonald's. To counteract this, every two weeks we have Club Time during our school day. Every adult at our school has a club, from the principal to the janitors, and 100% of our students are in a club. My club is Shark Club and we study sharks and other interesting creatures in the ocean.
My Project
In Shark Club we read about sharks, write about sharks, watch videos and live webcams of sharks, make graphs of the types of sharks we spot on the webcams, and make life size models of different kinds of sharks. I am requesting multiple copies of a few good books about sharks and materials for our paper mache shark models. These tools will allow my students to go in depth with our topic and expand their knowledge of creatures that live in the oceans. These exciting and interesting activities keep my students coming to school with enthusiasm instead of withdrawn boredom, and enthusiastic students are worth their weight in gold.
When students find a school topic to draw them in and a teacher that helps them learn about that topic they become more engaged about school in general.
As a teacher I love watching a sullen student find new energy and switch on to learning. In my Shark Club reading and writing goes on enthusiastically and my students and I enjoy learning. How often in a school day does that happen? How often can you actually support something in a school that kids love and look forward to?
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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 Ms. Woods and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
