My students live and attend school in a very small, very rural county. Our location has the potential to limit opportunities for my students. However, the students I teach should not be underestimated. In addition to school, most of them are involved in some combination of athletics, school and community organizations, and part-time jobs.
My students are hard-working young adults who have big plans for their futures.
They plan to go to college, enroll in technical school, join the military, or dive into the workforce. Preparing them for their future goals is no easy task. Because of where we live, most of them will have no choice but to venture away from home (at least for a few years) in order to pursue their goals. That means that they will need to dive into a world that is very different from where they have spent the first eighteen years of their lives. One of the ways that they are able to learn about the world beyond the boundaries of our community is through the books that they read.
My Project
One of the most important things I do for my students is to help them grow as readers. In doing so, I also try to help them grow as people by giving them access to books that both reflect their own experiences back to them and allow them to learn about the experiences of others. Reading fiction helps them to develop empathy for others, something that our world needs a great deal more of.
Having choice in what they read helps students to take ownership of their learning.
While students do a great deal of independent reading in my class that allows them to choose widely from a range of texts, they cannot read common texts unless it is a whole class novel. I want to give my students more opportunities to read books that they choose in groups with their peers. To do that, I need to build a small library of book club selections, and that is exactly what this project will help me to do.
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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. Zimmerman and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.