Interactive Classroom Literacy Center for my 6th Grade Class

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I teach at a small Leadership and Community Service Academy housed on the fifth floor of a massive middle school building in the University Park area of the Bronx. Our school holds high expectations for every student, both in the classroom and out, and strives to maintain a culture of leadership and academic achievement. I am given the freedom and support to develop units that are effective for my students' needs and interests. I have found, however, that the materials I need to create the literacy classroom I envision - namely an interactive classroom literacy center - are in short supply. As a sixth grade Communication Arts (English) teacher in an ELL classroom, I find that my students come to middle school from a myriad of literacy backgrounds. This translates into a need to creatively reach all my students to engage them in reading and writing while differentiating my instruction and classroom materials to the greatest extent possible. I have students reading on a first grade level, while others are reading on a seventh grade level. I have students who have written creative essays and extensive information reports, while others struggle to pen their heading. Then, on a powerful front, my students are being pulled in different directions as they reach an age where they become more independent individuals. Most of my students are first or second generation Dominican students who struggle with the ever-present middle school culture of apathy. In order to maintain our school's culture of leadership and my own classroom's culture of achievement, I try to make every interaction my students have with literacy engaging and interactive. A cornerstone of this goal is an interactive classroom literacy center. I envision an interactive literacy center as an extensive library, writing and word work center where students can engage with text, listen to powerful speeches, find and utilize resources for their own writing, and listen to themselves reading among other things. In order to create this center, I need the following materials: books shelves to house our library, a writing center, mini tape recorders, literacy games, quality texts, and word work materials. This library will be a cornerstone of our literacy classroom, expanding and touching more than sixty students each year. This is so essential for our classroom because it allows for the students to truly engage with literacy, allows for differentiation for my academically diverse students, and provides my ELL students the support and resources they need to become engaged readers and effective writers.