Books Please! My Students Are Begging For More Books!

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 Students

Our reading revolution is already underway. My students have found reading material that they love and want more. Students beyond our classroom know that they can come to our room to get really cool books. We need more so we can have a healthy supply for the increased demand.

My students are serious about their learning.

They don't like to admit it all the time, but they are proud of their learning and want to be successful students. As different as they are, they all have the same bright smile that can't help but spread across their face as they are recognized for their deep thinking. At the beginning of the year, few would identify themselves as recreational readers. For the first couple of months, some students struggled to finish a single book. Adding to the hurdles my students face, our school is only in its third year and our library is severely lacking. We're a small, innovated middle school in New York that is part the Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) program for the 2014-15 school year. Because our school is still in a start-up phase (just added eighth grade this year) we do not yet have a library that's capable of supporting the demand for cool books for an entire school year.

My Project

Students will read, read, read these books and then seek out more! A sample of high interest reading material I've been able to buy (and most recently, my first funded project on Donors Choose!) has already drastically shaken up the reading identify of my students. They now know there are awesome things to read and want to get their hands on anything and everything. These books are building the bridge to their identities as life long readers. Every day our students have a minimum of 25 minutes of individual reading. They complete a monthly book log tracking their pages read as well as a list compiling the books they've completed and attempted this school year. Our school goal is that every student finishes 20 independent reading books before the end of June (of course we do also have variations depending on students needs and abilities). Some students are shattering these expectations with their discovery of graphic novels. Their morale and interest in school in general is soaring.

I can't say it enough.

My students are begging for more books! Some students who had not read a book the first half of the year, finished THREE in a WEEK when our books arrived from Donors Choose. They're reading before classes, at lunch and at home. Now that my 8th graders are psyched about reading, it's spreading to other classes and grade levels. With these books, we're not only building a classroom culture, but helping to build a school identify as a group of dedicated independent readers.