My students need composition notebooks, colored pencils, scissors, card stock, envelopes, glue sticks, and colored paper.
$369 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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.
We are a low-income school at which nearly every student is a part of our free/reduced lunch program. Though my students are motivated to learn and grow, asking them to purchase supplies to create and maintain interactive notebooks is not a viable option.
My students are a colorful Rubiks Cube of joyful, complex thinkers who are hungry for new, student-centered challenges.
As a special education teacher, each of my students has a disability that not only brings diverse strengths to my classroom, but that also highlights the challenges they face on a day to day basis. I tap into their strengths by regularly encouraging my students to act, experiment with their voices, express a wide range of emotions, and interact with each other in order to grapple with challenging tasks like reading, grammar, and writing. My hands-on teaching style is effective, but I have been researching ways to increase retention of new content long after the performances, small group work, and discovery activities are over. According to my research, interactive notebooks will be the key!
My Project
My students will be able to better recall and synthesize their learning if they record it in their interactive notebooks. Interactive notebooks are a one-stop collection of color-coded notes, pop-up foldables, illustrations, written conclusions, partner games, sorting activities, scripts, annotations, and graphic organizers that my students get to personalize based on their preferences and strengths. An interactive notebook is different from a regular note-taking system. It provides structure for students who struggle with organization but allows for experimentation and artistry for students to conceptualize information in ways that are aligned to their personal learning styles. The more personal the learning process, the better--especially in a special education classroom!
Interactive notebooks give my students the chance to connect with challenging new content on a personal level--and, best of all, to create a resource for recalling and building upon that content in the future.
I have the unique opportunity of working with my students twice each day: they spend 50 minutes in a small, skills-centered class with me, and then they spend 50 minutes in a regular-sized class during which I serve them in a support capacity. This schedule allows me to pre-load academic skills in the small-group setting before they are expected to use those skills independently in the larger setting. The game-changer in this situation will be the interactive notebook: students can gain experience with new skills under my direction, express them in a variety of ways in their notebooks, and then reference them later on independently. Brilliant!
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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. E. and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
