Help me give my students a range of relevant books to build their literacy and their curiosity so that they can better understand themselves and the world, and build vital skills. These books will be read this spring.
$585 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
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.
Our school serves students in grades K-8 and provides rigorous academics, quality teachers and a safe and supportive learning environment. Our students and their families live in an area where high rates of poverty, gun violence, and drug use mean that our students face a multitude of obstacles on a daily basis in their pursuit of education.
Despite the challenges that many of our students face, they are incredibly motivated to succeed, and our school is one of the highest performing middle schools in East Oakland.
Many of our students come from Spanish speaking families, and over 30 percent are English Language Learners, which gives them a unique bilingual and multicultural perspective on their own education. Our goal is to prepare our students with the skills necessary for success in high school and college.
The 8th-grade Humanities classroom is a space for students to grow and clarify their voices. They need to cultivate a love of reading, build literacy, and grow their critical thinking and analysis skills.
My Project
Our 8th-grade classroom library is in need of an update. Students read in and outside of class daily, which helps them to build both a love of reading, and the literacy skills they desperately need to become the great readers, writers, thinkers, and speakers that they are growing into. About half of my students read multiple years below grade level, and about a third of students are English Language Learners; they need every tool they can get to work through the multitude of barriers they face to accessing a high-quality education. These books will give them a range of literature that they will use every day - both "mirrors" of their own lives, as well as "windows" to the experiences of others.
Most of the books that I am requesting for my students were requested by my 8th-grade students - many of the kids have breezed through much of our existing classroom library - graphic histories, sports novels, poetry books, and they are hungry for more.
The majority of these books are for students' daily independent reading - these are books at students' independent reading levels that will build their curiosity and their schema as readers, and it is vital that these books reflect their interests, passions, and wonderings. Other books are to add to our class materials - some additional copies of Young People's History to update our class text set so that each student has a copy of our anchor text to read during history lessons (we use these texts about twice a week). All of these books will be used by our kids this spring.
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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. Marika and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
