The cost of bilingual books, atlases, workbooks and other items for a Spanish/English library is $1010, including shipping and <a target="new" href="http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm" onclick="g_openWindow('http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm', 300, 800, 'fulfillwindow');return false;">fulfillment</a>.
I teach Spanish as a Foreign and Heritage Language at Chappell Elementary School, a Chicago Public School. I have a limited number of text books to use with my 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students. I have 164 students that come to my class once a day for a period of 40 minutes. My colleague also teaches Spanish to 6th, 7th and 8th grade and has a few more students than I do. We do have a Foreign Language Room devoted to teaching Spanish. The text books I have are mainly devoted to middle school student and my students are elementary school students. I have been buying a lot of books in order to enhance my teaching and offer a wide variety of learning experiences. I believe students need to strengthen their reading skills by having more exposure to texts of different genres in the foreign language class as well as in their home class. Being able to tackle cross curricular issues in the foreign language class can definitely influence their academic output in all other subjects.
It would be nice to build a library with books in Spanish and English that could both make the Spanish language closer to the students in an appropriate way and at the same time bring in the whole heritage and cultural knowledge that a language carries. Books that can take Hispanic countries and cultures to the reach of children emphasize such heritage knowledge. Language Awareness and the understanding of different cultures is something that can open students' minds to a better understanding of the world and help develop their own critical way of thinking. Having a diverse collection of books in the foreign language class would help students foster their language skills easier and offer a more eclectic way of approaching language teaching.
The library would include leveled reading books in Spanish. It would also include cultural and multicultural books, some bilingual and monolingual dictionaries and references, some atlases, some tapes/DVDs on different countries and cultures, workbooks and activity books on cross curricular activities in the language classroom and so forth. The total number of student that could benefit from this foreign language section would be of more than 400 since all students take 40 minutes of Spanish in a daily basis from 3rd to 8th grade.
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