This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Students
I teach Pre-K in an urban Title I elementary school that is located in South Gate, California. My class is comprised of 24 fun and enthusiastic 4 and 5 year old students. They come to school on Zoom excited and eager to learn every day. The majority of my students are from households with meager educational resources. They come to school with very limited skills and experiences. The entire student population at my school participates in the National School Lunch Program.
Despite the challenges of their environment, my students are loving, kind, and excited to make friends and participate in their first year of school.
However, due to Covid-19, it is likely that we will be learning from home for most of the school year. I've developed a fun, interactive distance learning model for my students to take part in that they really seem to be enjoying. I'm excited to think of where our distance learning journey will take us.
My Project
I love to teach counting and number sense to Pre-K students. In our classroom at school, there are MANY things to count--plastic dinosaurs, colorful bears, and connecting cubes, just to name a few. Unfortunately, my students have very limited resources to purchase educational materials, so they need access to manipulatives that they can count, sort, and use to reinforce important math concepts. Number sense is so important for young students to learn because it promotes confidence in mathematics. It allows children to think about numbers and quantities in many different ways. Students begin to talk about math as a language, instead of it being just rote memorization.
Math manipulatives such as counting bears are a necessary tool to practice skills such as sorting, counting, patterning, and measuring.
As we've made our way through the first month of distance learning, we've had to get creative in what to use for math counters. My students have used various small counters such as beans, cereal, and other random objects, but it's been very difficult to practice skills such as patterning, shape and color sorting, measuring, and building number sense when not every student has the same type of math manipulatives. If all of my students had a set of counting objects that were uniform in size, color, and shape, it would allow them all to put into practice the math skills they're learning while at home.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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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. Anderson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
