Literacy Resources: Building Our English Language Skills
Help me give my students tools to help build their language through the pocket charts that will house our vocabulary words and the chart paper that will be used for our daily morning message.
Each day, a group of 30 wide-eyed, kind, hard-working students enter my classroom to learn. We love to read, do science experiments, and share our math strategies with one another. We spend time sharing our similarities and discussing and learning about our differences.
The diversity in our classroom is what makes us so strong.
We have students from all different religious, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We use those differences to build a strong community in which we can learn new things from one another.
At our school, about 60% of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunches, and some are homeless and highly mobile. The school they attend is an inner city public school with limited resources. These students deserve the best - we would greatly appreciate any new classroom materials!
My Project
Every day, we begin with a Morning Message that tells the students what lies ahead in our day and asks them to practice a skill they've recently learned. We use these morning messages during our morning meeting to build literacy skills and revisit previously learned topics. We practice reading the message aloud to build our fluency, and we discuss the learning skill in pairs to further our speaking skills. The chart paper also gets used for other activities throughout the year, but the primary use is for our morning messages.
Literacy is a primary focus at our school, with about 50% of our students coming from non-English speaking homes.
The large pocket charts will be used to hold the vocabulary words that are introduced in reading, science/social studies, and math, and displayed in the classroom so the students can refer back to them throughout the unit. This will help our non-English speakers develop their language skills (as well as our English speakers!).
Lastly, the pencil sharpeners will be used to help our students keep sharp pencils during their writing activities. Throughout the year, we write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including fables, research reports, and opinion essays.
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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 Mrs. Sanow and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.