This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
Learning to read should be a magical journey into fascinating stories and fairy tale fantasies. Before we learn to read the words on the page, though, we have to learn to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken words. Usually, we work with abstract pictures of words when we learn about words.
Most of my students will come to school for the first time this fall, ready to learn to read.
Some of my students will enter Kindergarten after a year of Pre-Kindergarten, and will be ready to tackle more challenging texts. All of my students deserve to learn through play and exploration. Our school is a charter school that serves primarily low income students in Louisiana (92% of our students receive free lunch). Together we work to celebrate my students' cultural knowledge, while also working to gain the skills necessary to succeed in school. My students love to pretend, build, sing, dance, explore, discover, create, and above all, critically investigate the world around them. My students challenge me every day to be a better teacher for them.
My Project
My students arrive at school already knowing so much about the world, but they often haven't yet learned some of the things that school requires, such as letters and letter sounds. Last year in Pre-K we spent most of the year learning to identify letters and manipulate letter sounds, as well as how to match and produce rhymes. Because most of my incoming Kindergarteners will not have attended Pre-K, we will spend much of the first half of the year on these topics. I am asking for these teaching tubs so that we can make learning phonics a hands-on exploration of sounds. To learn these skills, we used decks of picture cards. For a five year old, it is one challenge to identify the letter or sound an object starts with. It is another to look at a picture and imagine what that object would really look like. Young children don't yet have the facility to readily translate the abstract to the concrete, and so some of my students really struggled to learn these paper-based skills.
Our scholars do not have many of the resources and supplies that their peers in wealthier regions do, yet they have the same willingness and desire to reach all of their ambitious goals and dreams.
Our scholars truly embody the spirit of the vibrant and resilient community that they live in. Our school has a severely limited budget this year. It is only with your help that our students will have access to these transformative classroom materials.
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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. Ponton and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.