Cultivate Readers With Engaging Books in a Classroom With Zero Books!

My students are residents of East Palo Alto, a racially and socioeconomically segregated community nestled within the massive wealth and privilege of Silicon Valley. They are the faces of resilience, hope, and positivity enclosed by aggressive gentrification and displacement facing their community. They are hard-working, amazingly kind-hearted, joyous scholars who belie the fact that approximately 42% of children in the district are classified as homeless. They are truly the personification of peace and love amidst our world's continuing social and educational injustices.

I have recently been placed in a classroom with NO books!

My classroom library is in extremely dire need of books, hopefully before my next bundle of first graders arrive in August! Meaningful literacy is built fundamentally by a love of reading. Appealing, enchanting books unfold an innate curiosity about literacy, the world, its language, its customs, and our endless capacity for creativity! I have selected both perennial first-grade favorites as well as texts accessible to readers across the spectrum of learning. I aspire to foster a passion for words, reading, and ideas among my young scholars.

Teaching Spanish literacy is empowering in both its valorization of a home language that is otherwise marginalized and devalued, as well as its capacity to facilitate deeper literacy skills in both Spanish and English. I feel excited to honor multilingualism and dispel damaging myths about how children can master only one language at a time. Even in the majority LatinX community of East Palo Alto, so many children believe Spanish is unimportant and a symbol of inferiority. I am so excited to fully immerse young scholars in the incredible world of Spanish literacy through an extensive, enthralling, and rich classroom library of well-loved and accessible texts such as those in the Authentic Spanish Language Collection and those in the Bilingual First Little Readers Complete Library set. Please help me fill my completely empty classroom library so students have books to read!