Our students are 3 and 4 years old, and attend a Head Start School affiliated with an urban, public school system. The majority of our students come from low-income families, and are faced with numerous challenges both in and out of the classroom. They do not always have the "typical" life experiences that create the knowledge of the world that most preschoolers possess. A typical day in our classroom is filled with various types of learning, including whole group instruction, small group instruction, and lots of fun, movement, and play!
Our students enter our classrooms every day full of energy and enthusiasm, ready to learn, and excited for what experiences we have planned for them.
We hope to help our students "break the cycle" of poverty by giving them the experiences and quality education they need in order to be successful throughout their educational careers. We firmly believe that Pre-K is the foundation of the rest of our students' experiences with school. By giving them engaging, exciting school experiences, we hope to set them up to succeed in school, as well as throughout their lives.
My Project
A typical day in a Pre-K classroom involves numerous opportunities to connect with books. Students "read" and look at books both independently and with friends multiple times a day. In addition, they listen to books be read by the teacher throughout the day, both as a whole class and in small groups.
Young children love being engaged with books, and even students who are unable to read independently love to use illustrations to help them tell stories.
But how can we extend this learning into the home? There is nothing teachers in our building want more than for our students to succeed! Having access to books, as well as hearing them read aloud, both at school and home, has been proven essential for a child to be successful in their academic career. Unfortunately, many children in our school come from low-income families, and therefore are more likely to live in "book deserts." In addition to lack of resources to purchase books, many families lack access to reliable transportation to travel to public libraries.
According to Mariah Evans, University of Nevada at Reno, "The number of books in a home has a more direct effect on the eventual level of a child's education than do the parents' education and economic standing." To help provide the foundation students need for future success, this project will begin to build a lending library that families can access while they are at our school. Even if they are unable to own a large number of books themselves, students will at least have the opportunity to be exposed to numerous high-quality, age-appropriate texts at home once the library is established. We are requesting books, books, and more books. From "The Giving Tree" to "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", we want enough books in our lending library for every child to find something that interests them!
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