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.
A Chinese proverb reads, "Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand." I teach over 100 sixth-eighth grade students Science at a low-income inner-city school. My students have grown to understand the meaning of Science by going beyond the old traditional teacher-centered methods to learning through hands-on experiences such as designing, constructing, and launching two-liter pop bottle rockets and dissecting fetal pigs. Unfortunately, our school's science budget has recently been affected by resource redistribution and financial cuts. I want my students to continue understanding Science through direct involvement of hands-on inquiry based projects.
The project that I am proposing for my students this upcoming year is experimenting with solar-powered inventions. After learning background knowledge on how photo-voltaic cells convert photons of solar light into electrical energy to power various pieces of technology, my students will work in small cooperative groups to create and conduct various experiments with the use of Photon Solar Racer Car Kits. These experiments will then springboard my students into the inquiry process of dismantling the car kits to use the PV cells and motors to create, construct, test, and then showcase their own solar-powered inventions. They will showcase their inventions in a school-wide event during our parent-teacher conference day to ensure opportunities to celebrate learning on a community-wide level. After that event, the groups of students will then have to reassemble the original solar car kits to ensure their use as a powerful learning experience for many more students in the years to come.
Your help in funding this project will help quench my students' thirst for hands-on inquiry-based learning experiences, thus giving them an equal playing field with more affluent suburban school children who receive more funding and resources from their school districts. This proposal is also aligned to our State Science Learning Standard that requires students to "HAVE A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THE PROCESSES OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY AND TECHNOLOGICAL DESIGN TO INVESTIGATE QUESTIONS, CONDUCT EXPERIMENTS AND SOLVE PROBLEMS." Last but not least, in this age of increased awareness of the alarming effects of global warming, the problem of finding alternative sources of energy and technology may be the most urgent problem that my students will face as our society's future leaders.
For the sake of the reasons mentioned above, please help ensure this learning experience for my students comes to fruition and I thank you in advance for considering this proposal!
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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 Mr. Kovach and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
