First Things First: Teaching Letters & Numbers the Write Way
I need to attend a 2-day Handwriting Without Tears training which will prepare me to teach early writing skills to students with limited writing experience through multisensory techniques and research-based methods.
My kindergarten classroom is bursting with 26 diverse young learners. The majority of my students are English Language Learners, including recent immigrants and refugees, representing 11 different home languages. I am humbled each day to work with a young "United Nations" of learners. My guiding goal is to make their first school experience nurturing, engaging, and supportive. I strive to guide my students toward becoming curious global citizens and lifelong lovers of learning.
The challenging reality is that most of my students are acquiring the complex English language simultaneously while learning kindergarten content, social norms, and adapting to the American education system.
In kindergarten, students are challenged to grow in countless ways. In terms of early literacy, students are expected to quickly advance from learning letters and sounds to writing and reading independently, as well as having increasingly complex conversations around texts, thoughts, and experiences.
As I look forward to my third year teaching in a high-need area, I am eager to provide my young learners with rich educational experiences and resources that can help establish a strong foundation and prepare them for future academic success.
Thank you for reading about my classroom and for considering contributing toward its success!
My Project
Confident and successful writers make confident and successful readers! This project will allow me to provide meaningful and fun early writing instruction to my kindergarten students, helping them to gain confidence and automaticity with writing and reading for a successful year in kindergarten and beyond!
I am requesting professional development that will equip me to provide developmentally appropriate support to my students in the most demanding content area in kindergarten - writing!
Writing at such an early age requires the coordination of so many emerging skills including: fine motor development, letter identification, letter formation paths, letter/sound correspondence, phonemic awareness, linguistic awareness, and vocabulary! This is a challenging task given that many of my students have not attended school before.
Handwriting Without Tears offers a comprehensive, interactive handwriting curriculum and teacher training rooted in multi-sensory techniques and research-based methods to make handwriting natural and automatic for all learners.
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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. Welsh and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
