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
We are drowning in paperwork! My high school Spanish students need help keeping all of their notes and class handouts organized so that they can build their study skills. All the answers they need to become better students will be in one convenient location!
My students are junior and seniors at a neighborhood public school in an inner-city district in Maryland.
Many of them have attended multiple high schools over the last three to four years and all of them live the realities of urban poverty every day. Despite their struggles, though, my students are some of the most vibrant young men and women I have ever known.
Foreign language is a graduation requirement for all students in Maryland. At our school, Spanish is the only foreign language offered. Being one of only two Spanish teachers gives me the pleasure of getting to know half of each class. Spanish is perhaps the most useful foreign language for students in our city, and my students easily recognize this. For this reason they exhibit energy and effort in my Spanish class, reveling in new vocabulary and coming to me almost every day with a story of using Spanish outside of the school walls. They deserve all of the opportunities available to their more fortunate peers.
My Project
Taking advantage of the latest research in the field of education and attempting to offer the most rigorous instruction possible, I have decided to provide my students with guided notes and handouts for every daily lesson. Each new vocabulary word is associated with an image and each new grammar concept is associated with a chart or some other kind of graphic organizer. At the end of each unit of study (I organize my units by theme, such as "food" or "family"), students have a stack of notes and handouts that help them organize everything they need to know to be successful in that unit.
This system is only effective if students have a means of organizing all of their materials. I have tried to have students bring in their own binders, but many students have been unable to acquire them. My goal is to provide binders for all of my students so we can work together to form better organization and study habits. These binders will without a doubt make my students more successful.
My students' largest need is their need to succeed in high school.
Unfortunately, without meaningful ways to organize the work they do in the classroom, they leave the building and it's out of sight, out of mind. When I ask students to take out their notes from the previous day, half of them rummage through their backpacks unsuccessfully and the other half openly admit that they have lost them. Binders for each student will make successful studying possible and change my students' lives.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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 Mr. Robinson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.