My students need books they've told me they need: books about sports, books with main characters who look like they do, books about #metoo, and Tokyo Ghoul (for the manga fans, of course!).
$309 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.
High school in 2018 is a battleground, and I'm not talking about fights in the hallways. I'm talking about the battle for student attention, the battle against the almighty smart phone. I think smart phones are wonderful in many ways, but they just don't offer the same experience as a good book.
My students are smart, imaginative, curious, and fun high school freshmen, but very few of them would call themselves readers.
Mine is an elective reading class that students do not elect. They are put in the class because of their low reading scores. The idea is that they need this extra support in order to be successful in high school. Many are considered "at risk." Low income inner city kids who attend a high school with a population of over 3,000 students, they are distracted by more than their phones. Poverty, gangs, these are just a few of the forces competing for their attention. Add to this the fact that few have parents or siblings who graduated from high school, let alone college, and you get a sense of the challenges facing these young people.
My Project
My students are on goodread. It's a website for readers to post reviews and to get recommendations of books they might like to read. I recently scrolled through and captured a fair sampling of the books they are interested in reading. That's what this project represents.
You'll notice that many of these books have Mexican-American or African-American protagonists and, in many cases, are written by people of color.
It is so important for my students to read books that are about people who look like they do and are written by people with names and faces that sound like their names and look like their faces. There are also a few titles here that relate to the #metoo movement. Books can help young women (and young men) process these concerns in a non-judgemental context.
Thanks for your help! I do my best to get free books from a local book repository and I buy books myself from discount book websites. When I really need to, I reach out to the wonderful Donors Choose community. I can promise you that these books are being read and enjoyed!
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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. McJimsey and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.