My students need 10 new Big Books and one Big Book kit, to learn reading skills and sight-words through modeling. The titles include "The Wind Blew" and "A Letter to Amy," plus a kit containing a set of 5 Eric Carle books.
$430 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.
Every year, we receive children into 1st grade who aren't familiar with concepts of print yet. They need to learn that these black squiggly marks mean something and we can tell what someone is saying by looking at them closely. Big books are an excellent way to unlock that world of words for kids.
I work in one of Boston's Turnaround Schools.
That means we were designated as under-performing for too many years in a row, and so last year a new principal and new staff were put in place to try to "turn the school around." SO here we are at the start of our second year, and though we have already seen great improvement thanks to generous support and lots of hard work, we still have a long ways to go. We are still working with a population that is 94% below the poverty line and 85% second-language learners. Yet our students are expected to pass the same standards as your average child of Concord, Newton, and other more stable communities. The students are great, and hard-working, but they require lots of exposure and practice with words. We are doing our best to give them those opportunities.
My Project
Big books are a coveted classroom resource. They are an easy way to engage children in a book, while cuing them in to different text features, reading behaviors, or word patterns. It's hard to find the right books for this, too, because if a book has too much print--it's overwhelming for new readers. If there isn't enough print--it doesn't enrich the students' oral vocabularies. So our challenge as teachers, is to constantly be looking for the perfect books that reinforce all of the different skills and strategies we want them to learn over the year. Currently, I only have a few big books available to me which would serve that purpose, when ideally, we need to use a new book every week.
My hope is that by the end of the year, our students will be strong, independent readers who have developed a love of reading and the desire to pursue their own reading interests.
But before that can happen, we need to first be sure that they have a good foundation in the concepts of print.
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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. Ellis and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
