One tiny room, one busy teacher, and 22 excitable first graders all doing something different at the same time! This is a brief description of what you might observe upon walking into my classroom during guided reading or literacy work stations. I teach first grade at a public elementary school to an average class size of 22 students. Like most first grade classrooms, mine is one that moves at a rather brisk pace in order to keep the students engaged and excited about learning. Also, like most first grades there is a very wide range of learning levels and styles.
It is always a challenging task to find a way to meet the needs of each individual child and to make sure that you find some time throughout the day to teach to individual levels rather than always teaching to the "average" first graders' level of learning. One of the ways I meet this challenge is to have small guided reading groups each day of the week. While I am meeting with a small group of students in order to better meet the needs of each child, the rest of the class is engaged in interactive literacy stations. The problem is that in order to effectively meet the needs of those students in my small group it is imperative that the other students are able to work independently with little or no help from me; as you can imagine this is no easy tasks when working with 6 and 7 year olds. One very affective literacy station is our listening center. We currently have the traditional classroom "listening center" in which several students can gather around the same device and all listen to the same story at the same time; however this requires valuable space in the classroom and a "set" of books on tape.
If we had a set of 6 Sony-Walkman cassette players (battery operated) then students could easily bring everything they needed for this literacy station back to their seats in order to enjoy the impact of such a great learning tool. This would solve the problem of having such little space to work with as well as allow more than just a couple of students to work at one time.
Your help will make it possible for six different students to be actively engaged in an independent learning activity all at the same time which will in turn have a direct impact on my ability to work with the students in my small group and the other students in the room to be more focused on their task because less students will be moving around the room or talking out loud. By helping us, you will be having a direct impact on one tiny room, one busy teacher and 22 excitable first graders!
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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. Ziegler and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.