My 7th grade students are brilliant, hardworking and creative. Many of them come from socioeconomic and linguistic backgrounds that sometimes create barriers to their learning; however, when they are presented with challenging and meaningful tasks they rise to the occasion.
I aim to make my classroom a sanctuary for my students, where they can feel comfortable and safe so they can reach their full potential.
It is my goal to provide my students with as many tools as is possible to increase their literacy and engagement in the educational process.
My Project
Each year my seventh grade students spend the first two months of school engaging in a realistic fiction unit. For this coming school year, it is my hope that I can present students with a work of realistic fiction that represents the realities of the society in which they are growing up. By creating a culture of critical consciousness students will be able to better understand the world in which they live, while also learning how to take action against oppression through this understanding.
The Hate U Give is a work of realistic fiction that will surely accomplish this task.
The book deals with the realities of their world including topics of race and racism, justice, activism, code-switching, community, and family. I hope that they will be able to see themselves within the characters of this book, and to engage in important conversations with their peers around these important topics.
My students were learning remotely for the entire school year during the pandemic, and as such they were required to learn from a computer for several hours a day. The constant inundation with technology did create a certain level of learning fatigue for these students, and took them away from some traditional methods of learning including from hard copy novels.
This coming school year will be a pivotal time to re-engage them in a traditional learning setting. Hard copies of the Hate U Give for each of my students will allow them to step away from online learning platforms in order to engage in some traditional reading, and rich classroom discussion.
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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 Ms. Heckstall and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.