My students need 50 binders (two different colors for the two classes), as well as dividers to organize their work and projects that they will be doing.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
My students need to be organized, focused, and professional in all their efforts. These habits are essential not just for students, but for life, and to combat the stagnation that comes often with poverty and violence.
At Holmes we teachers say "There's no place like Holmes." The school has a unique set of challenges as it is right across from a notorious Miami project and pulls most of its students from there.
Negativity is so often the norm there, which trickles down to the students. The kids, though, are so eager to please and feel that they are different than the labels affixed to them. They need the classroom to be not just a place of academic growth, but of character development. The school is overcrowded, and teachers wear many different hats but the overpowering theme is a desire to change students' lives and fill them with the promise and potential that we see in them each day.
My Project
To realize student change (academic and character) resources are merely a tool. But tools are useless without a plan. My classroom is founded on 5 Values that embed every aspect of class life: Team, Ethics, Professionalism, Inner Drive, and (most importantly) Grit. The latter refers to students ability to overcome emotions and situations and focus on the tasks at hand; an invaluable trait to have to be able to "make-it" form a disadvantaged area. The resources I am requesting will help immensely with these values, in particular "Professionalism". Explaining what these habits are to 4th graders is a slow process done more though actions than words. Students will be expected to keep a up to date calendar, put papers in proper sections, and track their own academic and behavioral growth all within the confines of the binders and tabs. Supplies are few and far between, and while I am OK supplying it, pencils are hard to keep up with (hence the pouches).
If you can help us with these supplies, my students will have an opportunity to gain habits that could really stick.
To change the way that their minds organize and to begin to value the importance of character and inner drive. These resources will give underprivileged students the chance to compete with other students In the 1950s the housing project my students live in was surrounded by a 6 ft wall, so as to forget them. Please help make sure that in 2013 they are not forgotten again. Thanks.
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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. Guerrero and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.