Do you remember falling in love with the stories you read in elementary school? With high stakes standardized testing on its way out, students and teachers are getting back the precious gift of TIME. Rather than reading the excerpts taken from novels, students can actually read the books in class.
Year after year, one of my primary goals as a teacher is to promote literacy, create meaningful opportunities to nurture lifelong readers, make reading relevant, and create a genuine joy of reading.
This simply cannot be achieved without the access to quality literature.
With a tremendous focus now on informational text, our language arts textbook has mainly excerpts from novels. How are students supposed to analyze and fall in love with characters when they are only exposed to bits and pieces of them? It's nearly impossible!
When I have been able to surround my students with high quality, high interest books, they initiate reading on their own! My students would just die with excitement if they could have their own copy of an exciting book...and so would their teacher!
My Project
With the story, "The Great Gilly Hopkins", my students would not only become more engaged readers, but also deeper thinkers. This story allows for dialogue and reflection on challenging topics like foster care, abandonment, and racial prejudice. It will also be used to teach students how to critically analyze characters, because they don't get much more dynamic than the lovely Galadriel Hopkins.
I will use the requested 36 copies to model the reading strategies needed particularly for fiction texts. It is my goal that students would then be able to apply these strategies independently with books of their choosing. I cannot wait to see them excited about this book!
What students read, or do not read, in school has profound, lifelong effects on them, both positive and negative.
This world is filled with marvelous, astonishing, interesting stories to read. These students just need the access and opportunities to actually read them. Please help put these texts in the hands of my students.
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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 Mrs. Cortez and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.