Our High School is a great place to go to school and I teach a great mix of students. I teach 3 sections of co-taught senior composition, one section of reading & writing basics, and one section of freshman English. My students have a wide range of abilities and skills. Our district works hard to do a great amount with significantly less funding than other high-need districts.
On average I see about 50-60 students a day who are below grade level standards.
I love who I teach. These students make it really fun to come to work each day. I love my students humor and honesty. I love that they feel comfortable telling me when something is not working and when it is.
Our district does provide us with lots of great supplies, but there are still many items I end up purchasing myself. In order to do the most for these wonderful young people, I need a little help.
My Project
Do you remember learning to write in high school? Was it a mystery you never solved or the code you couldn't wait to crack? For many of our kids it seems insurmountable. I want to make it possible for every student to feel like they have the potential to learn to write and communicate well.
There are just a couple small problems.
Number one, and this one's big, there is not a writing textbook in our school library or in my reading experience that is written in a way that includes everything my students need to know how to do in a stripped down way. The number two problem is that we have desks that are too small to have a big book and paper out at the same time.
I can't make the deals bigger, but I can work around them, while solving the bigger problem at the same time. I created my own writing manual. It's comprehensive and accessible for students at the same time. Unfortunately, it's too many pages to print one off one for each student. The obvious solution is to have a class set made up for students to use in the classroom and the easiest way to do that is with binders. Traditional binders take up too much desk space for students to be able to look at the guide and write simultaneously.
Mead makes a hybrid binder that moves like a notebook taking up half the desk space of a traditional binder. With page protectors and these high tech binders, my writing manual can reach so many students without the added environmental strain of printing each child a copy. If anything changes in the manual, it's the work of a moment to change a page or two.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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. Biondi and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
