I teach at a Title I school in North Carolina where one hundred percent of our students receive free breakfast and lunch. My amazing students come from a variety of economic and cultural backgrounds. Our classroom is a beautiful mixture of different ethnic groups, personalities, and learning styles. A portion of my students are socioeconomically disadvantaged living in poverty-stricken homes and facing a variety of hardships associated with poverty.
My students are eager to learn, but are often in need of an abundance of additional support, encouragement, and resources.
I am aware of the unfortunate challenges so many of my students are facing and battling outside of the classroom. Therefore, I feel it is prominent for me, as their teacher, to ensure our classroom is a safe, inspiring, and uplifting place where they can learn, make mistakes, and grow as individuals.
My Project
Base Ten Blocks provide a spatial model of our base ten number system and provide students with tangible manipulatives they can use to make connections between the relationships of numbers in our base ten number system. Therefore, Base Ten Blocks are essential manipulatives for building a strong foundation of number sense and place value understanding in the elementary classroom.
In our classroom we use Base Ten Blocks to model nearly every mathematical concept visually with hands-on manipulatives before practicing the concept using formulas or hand-drawn models.
This approach helps students to construct a concrete understanding of mathematics! Unfortunately, our classroom does not currently have enough Base Ten Blocks for each student to have their own set.
Funding this classroom project would provide each of my students with their very own Base Ten Block set! One-to-one Base Ten Block sets would allow each of my students an equal opportunity to get hands-on experience with the manipulatives. Often, with our limited amount of Base Ten Blocks, students are not receiving an equal amount of practice with the manipulatives, which can negatively affect student motivation and engagement.
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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 Mrs. Phillips and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.