My students need magazines that interest them as well as flashdrives for projects begun at home or at school so that they can continue their project wherever they go.
Using content-rich, advanced magazines as research starters, students need to be able to save their work and become fluent in different programs and media to explore the classroom connections to their outside research.
My students have a high IQ (145 and up) and are voracious readers.
They are also low-income and not from families that always supervise reading. Our school is Title One: a large portion of students are low-income or neglected. They tend to read too many graphic novels. I want to expose them to investigative non-fiction and more scientific journalism. I want to use flash-drives for various projects: many of my students don't have computers at home or don't have the money to get flash-drives. Nevertheless, they use public library computers, these student need to be able to transport and work on projects.
My Project
These magazines will offer the students a chance to read and do projects outside of the textbook, both language arts and science. They will see the joy of reading for pleasure: the pleasure of getting informed beyond shallow news coverage to deep substantive journalistic explorations. I teach Highly Gifted students at an Elementary Magnet school; as a consequence, it is hard to get my hands on resources at an level advanced enough for their capacity. These are magazines two grade levels beyond their age level but not above their cognitive level. The flash-drives will be used daily for projects of varying natures, but one such project is to take an mp3 instrumental piece home ("Popcorn" by Hot Butter), and to try to compose lyrics to it, then bring it back to school and present either their song live to the recording or a recorded version using a Garageband-like application.
Sure, school could just be reading the textbook, but school could also be about following interests and exploring new directions.
Out-dated magazines need to be replaced. Low-income students need help in order to access better the very limited computers already in my room. Students will be able to copy and transport their documents wherever they need to when working on PowerPoints or songs. These students are really smart; this project will help me get out of their way.
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