Help me give my students a bench that will function as a buddy bench in our schoolyard!
$691 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.
Since our "grand opening" in 2012, our school has made its sense of community one of our greatest priorities. Our New York City students come from families of all cultures, financial situations, and life experiences. Each child brings a unique lens through which they view the world and we have made it our mission to showcase the beauty of learning from different points of view.
In the six and a half years since our opening, our students have embraced the benefits that come from seeing through one another's eyes and have learned to look for the positive qualities in others.
From our youngest pre-kindergarten learners to our graduating fifth graders (and our teachers as well!), all of us strive to better ourselves and become increasingly inclusive every day. If you took a peek into our classrooms, you would regularly see discussions about differences, similarities, and reframing our definitions of "smart" and "capable" to reflect the strengths we notice in our friends and neighbors. We are incredibly proud of this work that our children are doing and we're constantly in search of ways to push their thinking further.
My Project
As part of our commitment to these important efforts, we want to create a "Buddy Bench" for our schoolyard. Using the buddy bench is simple and straightforward: If you don't have someone to play with at the moment, you can sit on the bench, and that signals to other children that they should come over and ask you to play. On a deeper level, the "Buddy Bench" is an excellent opportunity for kids to show empathy to others, a tool for reducing social isolation, and a strategy for meeting the emotional needs of our children when they're at school.
We want to make sure that every child always feels welcome at school, and we are confident that a "Buddy Bench" will help our children do exactly that.
We are asking for a bench that we can place in our schoolyard, where children have recess every day. We are developing a plan for introducing this bench to students across the school and reinforcing in our children the benefits of just saying "hello" or asking someone to play. With your help, we know that our loving, caring students will use this bench to reach out to children who are feeling lonely.
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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. Emma and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
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