My students need a library of board books that allow us to teach functional, academic, and communication skills while presenting them with engaging and relevant texts.
I am a special education teacher, and I work with a wide variety of students. Some of my students have learning disabilities and spend most of their day in their general education classrooms. Some of my students have more significant intellectual, behavioral, or communication needs and spend the majority of their day in the special education setting. We work hard and have fun!
I view my role as a special education teacher both as teaching my students the skills that will help them to lead their best, most independent lives, and as helping their classmates to understand how best to compassionately and appropriately make connections with students who are different than them.
We try to get out of the classroom and have as much authentic learning as possible in our classroom.
My Project
My students have really unique needs that can impact every area of their learning. I have been collaborating with our Speech Language Pathologist and Occupational Therapist to make units that start to expose kids to concepts of print, literature, and other basic skills in an engaging way. We need more board books in our classroom library, so that kids can re-visit and read books where they see characters that look like them and are working on the same skills they are working on.
We are working on building a library of high quality children's literature that gives us the building blocks for lessons on a wide variety of topics our students need to work on.
They love books and we need more representation and access!
My project is to get a library of 20 books that cover a variety of concepts: seasons, weather, basic functional skills, transportation and food. My colleagues and I will adapt these books so that we can use them to teach concepts of print, communication and fine motor skills, and to introduce the ideas of the books themselves. I’ve also asked for shoelaces to create lacing cards to go with books, and emotion tiles to help children to develop social cognition and regulation skills.
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. Jenson and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
