My students need visual supports for communication and to interact with their environment, as many of them are nonverbal. They need a printer to create these visual supports.
My students struggle with typical curriculum, structure found in classrooms, and both expressive and receptive communication. I have my classroom and instruction structured to allow movement, expression, foster independent investigation and fun interaction learning. My school is a Title I school and 90% are living in poverty or are homeless.
My classroom consists of all students with autism and each student has a spectrum of abilities.
My students come in everyday, work amazingly hard and absolutely give their best. They require a lot of manipulative objects, specialized curriculum and picture or visual supports for interactions in daily activities. My students are energetic, inquisitive, like routines, and long to communicate with those around them.
Despite their many different levels of disabilities, my students never cease to amaze and surprise me. They struggle with receptive and expressive language, both fine and gross motor skills, academic concepts and behavioral skills. These are all areas that I work very hard to support and build a foundation for that will allow them to learn at their pace and their level.
My Project
For my particular students, communication and interactions with the world around them is often difficult. To help facilitate this, my students often use pictures to express how they feel, what they need or want, and responses to academic questions. For this to be facilitated, it requires a high level of printing colored visual supports for the students specific needs. Watching a student struggle to communicate and have difficult behaviors, learn how to use a visual support to gain what he or she needs, is an amazing part of my job. However, the high cost of ink makes me as a teacher be selective of the pictures that I create or print. This printer would allow me to print more supports for my students at a much lower cost (as I often purchase ink out of my own pocket), allow for a much higher yield of pictures, and make less of an impact on the environment as I will use much less ink cartidges. Please consider helping me to give my students the ability that many of us take for granted; the ability to communicate with the world of them.
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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. Zepmeisel and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
