This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
I am a reading teacher at a K-8 center in Miami. I teach middle school reading to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders who are struggling with reading. My school is a Title I school which means that about 90% of the students at my school receive free or reduced-price lunch due to their low socioeconomic status. The school is in a high poverty neighborhood so many of my students come from families who struggle financially. As a result, my students endure more problems than average children, and these problems interfere with and hinder their learning.
Being the middle school reading teacher, I am responsible for helping my students improve their reading skills so they can be successful lifelong learners.
I know that my job is extremely important in helping them be successful in life. Therefore, I am always searching and seeking new reading strategies and resources to improve their reading and keep them motivated and engaged.
My students just need someone to believe in them and give them the tools to be successful. As Joseph Addison says, "Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."
My Project
Today, reading informational text is a part of everything we do in our Information Age Society. The reason for that is people have more accessibility to information due to the Internet and technology. We can find information at our fingertips on any topic just by searching on the internet, watching a video, or reading a blog/news article. As a result, education has shifted its standards to require teachers to teach students on how to tackle informational text.
In order for students to survive and be successful in the Information Age, they need to learn how to find information and how to evaluate the information they find within science and social studies texts.
Not only are schools required to teach students how to grasp informational text, but the statewide assessments, ACTs, and SATs are also assessing students in how to analyze, synthesize, comprehend, apply, and respond to science, social studies, and humanities texts.
Being the middle school reading teacher, I am aware how critical it is for me to provide the tools to my students who are struggling in reading. This will not only help them with their assessments, but it will also help them be successful in their science and social studies classes. For this reason, I have found online reading programs that focuses on informational texts while helping them apply reading strategies, build vocabularies, and respond to the text with comprehension questions and writing. I do not have enough computers in my classroom for my students to access these programs even when I teach small group. This is why I need more Chromebooks in my classroom so I can get all of my students access to these programs. It will really help them become successful 21st-century learners in the Information Age.
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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 Dr. Opoku and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
