My third grade students attend a very small, rural Pennsylvania school. Many of my students come from low-socioeconomic families and over half our school qualifies for free or reduced price lunches. However, our teachers embrace this rural advantage and make the effort to break the mold of the traditional classroom setting by connecting our students to their community and utilizing the plethora of resources that our country setting provides us.
Our students are continually experimenting, creating, and thinking critically in our new STEM lab and outdoor classroom.
They are passionate about learning and thrive when presented with new tools and experiences. Despite all of our hard work, many continue to struggle with the very basics of literacy, math, and STEM learning, which all focus on skills they will need throughout the rest of their lives. With the implementation of the new Common Core Standards, expectations in are higher than they have ever been before. Through this project, I hope to continue to instill a love of learning in my students, while helping them to become better critical thinkers and problem solvers.
My Project
Two years ago I made the transition to a third grade classroom. With a new school year and a new classroom, and after 8 years of teaching, I was starting from scratch for new materials to implement in my learning routine. While I acquired a library full of instructional worksheets, manuals, and books, my toolkit was in serious need of some hands-on learning CPR! Through Donors Choose I was able to obtain some fantastic mathematics file folder games that we now use all of the time! I would like to extend our library to include file folder games for literacy, social studies, and science.
My students are so inundated with paper and pencil lessons, and it is my hope that by providing new literacy, science, and social studies interactive learning centers I will be opening a new world of cooperative learning to them that they have never before experienced.
The reading and writing folder game library will be used to remediate anchors in a tiered setting that will reinforce literacy skills that enhance fluency and comprehension. The science, social studies, and coding folder games will provide extended practice in subject areas that are often overlooked with such intense focus on state testing.
Resources such as these help children to set goals and find success at their own individualized level, allowing all students to realize their innate potential that will propel them in their future educational endeavors. The skills they will be practicing will translate into their education, workplace, and social relationships, and in doing so, will follow them for the rest of their lives. I instruct a population of very enthusiastic learners and I am anxious to introduce these new resources into their classroom routine, because I know they will share my excitement for this new approach to learning.
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 Mrs. Ingram and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
