Do You Hear What I Hear?

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.

My Students

With the innovative age of technology, we are presented with new opportunities. Our school has many computer-based programs for which our district is providing technology. Unfortunately, the budget was limited and the district could not supply us with headphones to go with this technology.

At our school, we have many levels of support for students who are not learning at grade level.

They are still responsible for learning the same content standards as all other California students, but can be as far as four grade levels behind. These students persevere through difficult tasks to improve their scores on a daily basis. Our program for students with special needs include special day classes, resource classes, intervention classes and grade-level classes. Each of these offers a different level of support. We have been provided with computer programs and iPad applications for reading and writing that the students are using to gain skills and confidence. Students set their own goals and measure their achievement toward that goal. These students have become increasingly confident in their individual progress.

My Project

We have computer-based programs that support these learners such as Lexia, Moby Math, EPGY and Accelerated Reader. Our students enjoy working on these programs and are demonstrating growth in their reading and math skills. Unfortunately, the students have found it difficult to focus on their own task at hand when they can hear the person next to them learning a completely different skill. Headphones will help our students stay on task and progress even more in the same amount of time. Generous donors have also provided our classrooms with some MP3 players that play books on tape. Students need headphones to access these grade-level text to improve their comprehension and fluency skills.

These headphone will create a calm learning environment for students to do their individual practice after class lessons and group work.

We promote differentiated learning and teach in multiple means of instruction. Headphones will help our individual stations become more successful and give our students a better chance of gaining the skills necessary to learn grade-level content.