My classroom is made up of 31 students ranging in grades Kindergarten through 5th grade. The classroom is a Learning Center which is a combination of students who have less than 50% of their school day in a small group environment and more than 50% of their day (but less than 75%) in a small group environment. Their disabilities range from Learning Disabilities, Speech and Language Impairments, Other Health Impairments, Autism, Emotional Disturbances, and Visual Impairments. I love my students so much. They work so hard for me each day and I am trying to provide them a classroom that is stimulating academically so that they can take the information they are learning in my class and use it in their general education class and ultimately in life.
I use a reading program in my class called Read Naturally. I have seen huge success with this program. Students have gone from non-readers to fluent readers within a year and a half. The problem with this program is that each student needs access to headphones, cassette players, and a heavy duty cassette player for rewinding tapes. I have 1st-5th graders participating in this program daily and unfortunately their hands drop things and bend things easier than adults. Therefore, my tape players are dying and headphones are breaking. Another problem I have is that my students have to wait in line, sometimes 6 deep, to rewind their tapes which wastes their time when they could be reading or answering questions.
If my students had access to new headphones, cassette players, and a heavy duty cassette player that we could use to rewind tapes, my students could be participating in the reading program and not waiting for others to finish rewinding their tape or to share a cassette player. It saddens be sometimes to watch them so patiently waiting for the children in front of them to finish with their tape players or to rewind their tapes, when they really want to be reading with the narrator or reading to the teacher after they have answered their questions.
Your help will ensure that my students have an opportunity to participate in a research based reading program with all the necessary materials that program needs to make them successful readers.
More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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