My students need high quality, engaging, and thought provoking books that are integrated into the ACCELERATED READER program. All of these books are Newberry awardees.
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 Students
My school is the first public STEM school developed in our rural border county. Our entire school participates in the ACCELERATED READER program which tests student comprehension and retention through interactive, technology-enabled quizzes, and incentivizes reading with a points and awards system.
We are located in a rural border community that allows our students a variety of ways to see science, technology, and various aspects of the human condition at work in their daily lives.
As a STEM school we know that using highly engaging texts, interaction with technology, and incentives facilitates reading, comprehension, retention, and learning. Great books help to recreate a microcosm of the human experience in the classroom and enables students to engage the experiences of others, told in the books, on a personal level to understand how and why people do what they do. We nurture a deep joy of reading in our students, and high quality books are crucial to this effort. Much of our curriculum is math, science, engineering, and technology based. These subjects are vitally important for our students' and our community's futures but our students will only apply their technical learning at its best with a deep appreciation for the humanities that comes through reading great literature.
My Project
Our school uses the ACCELERATED READER program. This program has a large collection of comprehension and retention quizzes available for grade and reading level appropriate texts. The quizzes encourage close reading of texts for deep understanding and enable a points and awards incentives program which promotes reading volume. All the books that this project will provide are winners of the prestigious Newberry Award for Children's Literature, and/or other prestigious awards and recognition; they are all part of the ACCELERATED READER program. This project will provide a classroom of 60 students with 68 books distributed over the range of reading levels currently present in the class, and consistent with historical and projected reading level ranges. The range of reading levels represented in the book collection is distributed to meet current student needs and drive future reading ability growth. All of the themes and ideas presented in the books can be related to other subjects.
Families choose our school for their students because they know and want the importance of the highly technically focused education we deliver.
While we appreciate the uniqueness and the necessity of the curriculum we provide in an elementary setting, we also understand the need to temper technical education with a solid grounding in the humanities that students will eventually need in order to apply their technical learning most effectively. Having the right tools makes all the difference.
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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. Cabanillas and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
