"Choose Kind."
This is the reoccurring message throughout the novel "Wonder" and a message I want my 5th graders to carry with them to middle school.
I am one lucky teacher.
I will be looping with my fourth graders from this past year. I will be the fifth grade teacher of 23, curious, intelligent, and hilarious students. This past year I learned that my students have had very little experience with learning about social justice issues. They, however, were very intrigued with these topics, and I hope to incorporate them more into my classroom next year.
The majority of my students are Native American who live in New Mexico on the Navajo reservation; 100% receive free lunch. Our school is one plagued with poor attendance and many remedial classes. This a lot of required "intervention" time to try and catch my students up and little time for social studies, science... and even novel studies. My students however do not allow these statistics to define them. They are genuinely curious about the world around them and are excited to learn.
My Project
As a first year teacher, I have already experienced the trouble with basal readers. While these readers are efficient by providing teachers with various fiction and nonfiction texts and reading skills to be taught, they are also very limiting. Many of my students are not reading novels because they are so accustomed to reading only the short excerpts these basal readers present. These excerpts do not allow my students the opportunity to do in-depth studies of character, theme, etc. They are also not always relevant to my students' lives or even interesting for them (or even me as a teacher).
With the humor of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series and the message of kindness and hope, the novel "Wonder" by R.J. Palacio is one I know my students will love! Kindness is a character trait I want to instill in my students, especially before they head off to middle school.
Help my students fall in love with a piece of literature that has the potential to make them more compassionate.
"Wonder" will not only expose my students to more in-depth and rigorous literature study that they will likely encounter in middle school, but will also allow them to see the power that comes from being kind. This message of kindness is essential for my students to learn before entering middle school.
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. Durbin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
