Increasing Reading Comprehension and Cultural Competency Through Literature
Help me give my students exposure to culturally diverse characters, authors, and ideas by helping me create a classroom set of fiction/nonfiction texts!
FULLY FUNDED! Ms. Taylor's classroom raised $325
This project is fully funded
My Students
For the first time in my teaching career, I have been blessed to have a classroom that mirrors America. We are diverse in every way imaginable and have built strong collaborative relationships in our class through lots of loving trial and error.
Now I want to continue to create and foster a culture of kindness and respect by adding much more diversity in the books we offer in our classroom library.
I am interested in making the world a kinder, more respectful place, and for me that means planting seeds of kindness and respect into the students that I teach now by exposing them to different walks of life, like characters who are informal immigrants or characters who are differently-abled or deal with the complications of a differently-abled family member. I want students to see the humanity in characters who are considered poor and uneducated as well as to see the humanness of those who have fame and wealth.
Help me create a space for cultural competency and comprehension all in one. Donate books that change our perceptions of the world.
My Project
No one can truly become a productive citizen of America without first understanding what it means to be kind, respectful, and culturally competent. In our current world, my students see many opportunities for strife and division without ever really getting an opportunity to see the people behind the wars, politics, religious movements, and nonstop flashing news stories.
But when students read about culturally diverse characters in literature and real people experiencing the same emotions and struggles as they do in informational texts, they get an opportunity to contemplate and expand their world view.
They see the differences in culture, but they also get to see that a kid who is deaf has the same internal struggles as one who is not; that a student who lacks resources--black, white, or interracial--must face and overcome the same hurdles. My goal is to provide my students with books that they will enjoy--but that will open their eyes to the many lived experiences of children just like them who don't seem like them at first.
Books like A Long Walk To Water and Boys Without Names show the extraordinary odds that children in other places experience while still dealing with the normal every day changes of growing up. Books like Five Flavors of Dumb and Inside Out and Back Again show students what it feels like to be differently-abled without shame or even sometimes trying to overcome it.
Nearly all 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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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. Taylor and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
