I am a 7th grade English Language Arts teacher in a middle school where 97% of students are eligible for free lunch. Last year I taught 6th grade and have switched to teach the same students again in the 7th grade. The majority of these students failed the E.L.A. state exam in 5th grade, and improved their scores on the 6th grade exam. As their teacher for a second year in a row, I have the unique opportunity to work with the same students again, and hope to push them farther into academic and literary success.
As such, I’m looking for new riveting reading materials. Particularly I am looking for fantasy books, as the 7th grade curriculum focuses on this genre. Forty minutes of reading per day enables students to improve their reading level by two years in the time of one. My students will spend twenty minutes in class and forty minutes at home everyday reading books of their choosing from our classroom library. We face two big problems: 1) last year my students read most of the already limited selection of books in my classroom library; and 2) we only have one copy of most books, making instructive conversations between student reading groups difficult.
I am hoping to be able to provide eight copies of each of the following 16 fantasy titles:
1) Into the Cold Fire (Daughters of the Moon #2) by Lynne Ewing
2) City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments Series # 1) by Cassandra Clare
3) Valiant; A Modern Tale of Faerie by Holly Black
4) Into the Wild (Warriors Series #1) by Erin Hunter
5) Moonrise (Warriors: The New Prophecies Series #2) by Erin Hunter
6) Redwall by Brian Jacques
7) Magyk (Septimus Heap Series #1) by Angie Sage
8) Flyte (Septimus Heap Series #2) by Angie Sage
9) The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series #2) by Rick Riordan
10) The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series #1)
11) The Titan’s Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series #3) by Rick Riordan
12) Ruins of Gorlan (Ranger’s Apprentice Series #1) by John Flanagan
13) Skulduggery Pleasant (Skulduggery Pleasant Series #1) by Derek Landy
14) Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer
15) Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer
16) Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
All students deserve access to great books, but these students in particular, with their socioeconomic disadvantage and continuing ascension to improved literacy, need these new books to spur them to continue to become the readers they are capable of becoming. Please help my students by providing these fantasy books, so that they will be inspired to read more, to become better readers, and to believe in their potential to become the heroes and heroines of their wildest dreams.
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