Awakening The Advocate In Young Minds - Imagine II

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.

My colleague and I teach in a mostly Hispanic populated urban area with an average of about 98% of students receiving free lunch. This is my third year as a first grade teacher, and my first year as a Dual Language teacher (teaching the English component and my colleague teaching the Spanish component). It is her seventh year as a Dual Language teacher in the early grades. So far, we have a total of 49 students. A big job! I now ask you to imagine yourself as a child filled with the wondrous possibilities in the world around you, and not having the opportunity to know about them, even through the magic of reading. While the feasibility of reading may be easy to some, it isn't for many others. Our students this year are even more willing and ready to learn about so many things in their world. We hope to empower both first grade classes to not only become future advocates for sound social causes, but to become proficient English readers in the process with one of the highly regarded magazines around - Weekly Reader. One of the things we try to instill in our students is that age isn't a factor in making things happen in their world. Last year, my proposal was kindly funded with a year's subscription of Weekly Reader and it's "sister" subscription of Science Spin. You should've seen the faces worn with each magazine's weekly arrival. Some of my students even kept them neatly packed in their folders to read over again and/or share with a reading buddy outside the classroom. Yet, the greatest achievement was to see first-hand my mostly pre-emergent readers turn into above grade level readers - 16 out of 24 of my students achieved end of second to third grade level reading. The magazines provide NYS standards in simple, yet informative articles, vivid pictures, reading comprehension activities with phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and more. The issues are mailed weekly instead of monthly, and include either national, historical and/or worldly event themes. In-class participation would include: shared reading, partnership reading (partnering weaker and stronger readers), and independent reading via our either 90 minute literacy time in the mornings or during the afternoons in the content areas. In addition, some in-home reading and writing assignments with a morning follow-up would also be involved in each of the English and Spanish classes. Lastly, the subscription provides teachers with lesson plans and larger sized issues teachers can read aloud to their students, while simultaneously allowing students to follow text. This enables students to recognize essential vocabulary, and become in-tune with fluency and phonemic awareness. This allows students to challenge themselves and each other when reading independently or in their partnerships. I do hope a donor shares in our enthusiasm and serves as the instrumental tool to enrich and empower our future English Language Learners this coming year. Thank you!