More than half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education.
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Finding the right book, especially in 9th grade when students are thinking a lot about the kind of people they want to be, can literally change a student's life. Last week, a student was looking for a new book to read for my class. I showed her some options, and she picked The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, a novel in verse about a teenage girl who navigates the challenges in her life and finds her voice through poetry. She wasn't even half way through before she asked me about other books the author had written. She said, "I was reading last night, and I was feeling really happy... it was weird!" She said that had never happened before when she was reading a book.
Adding these books to my classroom library will help me create that potentially life changing reading experience for all of my students for years to come.
Representation is an important factor in finding the right book. The books on this list, many of which my students asked for specifically, will diversify the stories that I have available to students so that they can see pieces of themselves in these stories and learn about the experiences of people who are different from them. So many wonderful books have been published in the past couple years by an increasingly diverse and talented pool of writers specifically writing to reach audiences like my students. I would love nothing more as a teacher than to share them with my students.
About my class
Finding the right book, especially in 9th grade when students are thinking a lot about the kind of people they want to be, can literally change a student's life. Last week, a student was looking for a new book to read for my class. I showed her some options, and she picked The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, a novel in verse about a teenage girl who navigates the challenges in her life and finds her voice through poetry. She wasn't even half way through before she asked me about other books the author had written. She said, "I was reading last night, and I was feeling really happy... it was weird!" She said that had never happened before when she was reading a book.
Adding these books to my classroom library will help me create that potentially life changing reading experience for all of my students for years to come.
Representation is an important factor in finding the right book. The books on this list, many of which my students asked for specifically, will diversify the stories that I have available to students so that they can see pieces of themselves in these stories and learn about the experiences of people who are different from them. So many wonderful books have been published in the past couple years by an increasingly diverse and talented pool of writers specifically writing to reach audiences like my students. I would love nothing more as a teacher than to share them with my students.