KinderGators Need a Leveled Book Library!

My Students

Help 24 kindergartners learn to read! My students are in desperate need of leveled readers to use during small group guided reading. Guided reading is an essential skill to help emergent readers, and my charter school has no budget to fund buying us more books.

I just finished teaching my first week of kindergarten at my charter school in Arizona.

The school is in the southwest side of my town, which is a low socioeconomic community. Our school was birthed ten years ago in an old K-mart building, and exists to strengthen the southwest side community by fostering, increasing, and promoting a higher quality of educational opportunities. This is my first year teaching at this school, and I am anxious to give these students the same opportunities and experiences that students in any better funded school would have. Coming into this classroom, I was supplied with the bare minimum, including a few baskets of some books that are old and not the appropriate level for emergent readers. Our school does not have the budget to supply our classroom with books. My students deserve and need leveled books to help them learn to read. These are incredibly sweet children who are very eager to learn. I need help financially to supply my students with all the materials they need.

My Project

This is my first year at my charter school, and I was shocked to learn that I would need to supply my classroom with any supply out of my own pocket. This includes paper, pencils, crayons, and scissors. We do not have a supply room, and our resource room with books is incredibly limited. I have been able to supply some things, and parents have bought their children some essentials on their limited budgets. However, purchasing a library of leveled books is out of my means and theirs. I need leveled books so that I may begin doing guided reading with small groups. "The goal of Guided Reading is for students to develop skills to help them read independently, silently, and fluently. In these groups, they learn reading strategies such as looking for context clues, understanding syntax or word structure, and using inference skills, to help them read text that may be unfamiliar to them. In the small group, students can also learn from and support each other." (www.pbs.org)

If you donate to this request, you will be helping an entire group of children learn to read!

With these books I can teach in small groups, and there are huge benefits to that. "Students develop as individual readers while teachers are available for support and scaffolding, learn skills and strategies that will allow them to read difficult texts independently, experience success in reading for meaning, and receive more individualized teaching time."(www.pbs.org)