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.
I am an English Enrichment teacher for grades 6-8 at a Charter School in Chicago, Illinois. I teach in a diverse community with a 93% poverty rate and students from around the world. I teach Language Arts, Social Studies, and work with other grade level Language Arts teachers as a support class where the students get extra help with reading, writing, grammar, and test-taking/organizational strategies.
Our charter school is based around the High Tech High Project Based Learning Instruction. Units are centered on an inquiry based approach so students can extend what they have learned through project activities. We are a fairly new charter school and our programs and lessons are getting stronger every year. I am finding that I have to borrow a lot of materials from teacher friends and family to offer students a variety of resources that most students at schools already have. While this process is working, it is getting extremely difficult to do because my borrowed materials are needed by their owners and the skill levels of my students are so varied that some of the materials can not be used by everyone.
Working with such a diverse classroom has its rewards but also its limitations. A majority of the time students have to read different books at the same time because I have so many students reading at different levels. For the most part a lot of my special education, English language learners, and regular education students enjoy being read to at times. This is difficult because they are reading different books and there is only one of me.
A listening center would really alleviate the stress involved with literature circles and students who perform on various stems of the education spectrum. It would allow me to read to some students and have others being read somewhere else in the room, undisturbed. It would also allow students who have been absent to catch up with certain novels without feeling the restraints of not being able to take a book home and so forth. A listening center would be a great alternative to expose my students to reading and literature in an effective way.
By using a listening center I could expose my students to literature in a more effective way.
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. Zane-Lundin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
