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
The most fun and often most challenging part of my job is guiding scholars toward the path of falling madly in love with reading. I work to help scholars choose books on their level and according to their interest.
My sixth grade scholars come from low-income neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
They go to school for ten hours of rigorous instruction each day and sometimes they even come on Saturdays for extra tutoring. They have the completely ambitious challenge to read 1.2 million words this year and to pass their comprehension quizzes on each book at an 80% level. Wow! Every year many scholars succeed and some scholars fail, but the key to the scholars' success who make it is that somewhere along the line, they got hooked into reading.
My Project
My scholars have finished reading the first book of the Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins and are clamoring to read the rest of the series. Since last year, it seems that all but two of our copies of the second book have gone missing! In addition we have only a few copies of book three and no remaining copies of books four or five. It is so exciting when scholars are excited to read a certain series and it breaks my heart to have to tell them that we don't have the book. My scholars will read this series of books during their independent reading block in school and also for their assigned independent reading time at home for homework.
What is especially promising about scholars being excited about this book series is that after reading the whole series, they will have read at least 350,000 words toward their goals of reading 1.2 million words this year.
Additionally, having read this series of books will be the trigger that turns many of these children into lifelong fantasy readers.
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 Mrs. Maqsood and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
