My students need a class set of Robert Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die to read and grapple with as they are challenged to understand the concept of coming of age and farm-to-table concepts.
Many of them have experienced trauma in their lives and have difficulty coming to and staying in school. Our classes serve students with a range of disabilities, including intellectual disabilities, emotional disturbance, autism spectrum disorder, and specific learning disabilities. The typical student in my class reads at a third grade level and many struggle with basic phonics and number sense. 70% of our students are African American or Latino. The opportunity and achievement gaps are apparent among our student population. Our English department budget is $500 for over 500 students. Our classrooms are dilapidated, textbooks are outdated, and technology is virtually nonexistent. Special education teachers are expected to deliver excellent instruction in science, math, English, and history without the requisite tools to teach our students.
My Project
The use of books in the classroom is almost a daily activity in my classroom, especially in English Language Arts. Using the Socractic model in English, students read along and are asked to read when they feel comfortable reading. The classroom books allow me to see exactly where they are and what they are doing, as well as provide an easy place for them to show and understand, look back and grapple with their work. What becomes a problem is the fact that the books never seem to last. Students have shared books in class. They never seem to complain. They are hungry for knowledge and see the inconvenience as just that, an inconvenience. Even though they are great about doing this, it is distracting for many of my students who have focusing issues and they miss important concepts, ideas, themes from either myself or other students. By having a classroom set of Robert Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die, students will be able to avoid all of these problems and focus on increasing their learning!
By donating to our project, you will not only help to improve and increase student attention and focus, you will ultimately help to increase their academic achievement.
Students will be able to simply focus on the academic material at hand, and not whether their books have enough pages, missing pages or not. Plus in this technology literate world, where sometimes we forget the need for students to hold a book and turn pages, this classroom set of books will allow for a much needed interaction not with updated technology but with each other to grapple with concepts and ideas that will increase their literacy as well as their desire to learn and use the written word that created so much more than technology.
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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 Mr. Sneed and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.