The students I have the pleasure to teach are some of the most passionate, sweetest, exuberant kids you will ever meet! Many of them are also students who have faced many hardships in life and will continue to face many hardships. Our school is a Title I school serving low-income students from all over the city of Nashville, TN. Many students come to our school without ever having been in a Pre-K program of any type. Therefore, some of them are often lacking in skills that perhaps their same-aged, higher income peers have already mastered. Our school is determined to make sure that by the time our students leave our school in 8th grade, they are caught up and on the path to college success. College and life success depends on creating students who are life-long learners and lovers of gaining knowledge!
I truly hope that in my classroom all of my students feel the excitement that comes from gaining knowledge and discovering something new every day!
My Project
My bright and wonderful students have time each day to read independently and also to rent books from the classroom library to take home. Frequent experiences of reading engaging texts has shown to increase reading growth. To create these experiences, they need books that they are both interested in because they see themselves reflected in the pages and that are also on their independent reading level.
In the words of Jacqueline Woodsen, "This is how a door opens—a child picks up a book and finds a part or many parts of their lives on the page.
And because of this, the child keeps reading. And keeps reading."
My project seeks to increase the diversity of characters and experiences in our classroom library so that when my students pick up books they want to keep reading as much as possible; I want them to see the book as a mirror of their life. I teach a diverse group of children that are not fully represented in the books that we currently have in our classroom library. By not seeing themselves in books, my children are not given the opportunity to fully connect with the characters in their stories - a key point of engagement in developing reading skills. I'm excited to share books with my students that reflect characters that look like them and live like them so that they love reading as much as I do!
More than a third of 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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