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.
My Students
My students are as diverse as New York City in race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and ability. Our school demographics are sixty-two percent Hispanic, twenty-eight percent black, five percent Asian and three percent white, with over 85% of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. My students come to school every day from all five boroughs with various needs, persevering against all the challenges life has thrown at them.
I have students who come to school with so little and students coming to school without breakfast and without backpacks.
Some cannot live at home with their parents and some do not even have a place to call home. Our students deal with many challenges including mental health issues, gun violence, and pregnancies. I want to be able to use my time with my students to provide them all with the educational opportunities they deserve.
My Project
For some students, reading comes easy and is a joy. For some students, reading is a challenge to engage with. Either way, students who engage in more reading outside of the classroom have stronger reading and vocabulary skills. The questions then becomes, how do you get all types of different high school students to engage in reading when it is not something assigned for class?
What we do know, is that students are more likely to engage in reading and continue reading at home when they have books they want to read.
So we went around asking students what books they wanted to read. Fiction or nonfiction? Romance or horror? Poetry or encyclopedia? This list of books was put together by students, for students. Each book was selected by a student, in the hope to increase reading outside of the classroom. With this project, we hope to inspire students to find new books and topics that they enjoy reading about, and through this build students into life long lovers of reading. Especially with all the uncertainty that Covid still has on our students lives, giving them their own independent reading books means that more of them get a chance to engage in reading on their own. By increasing literacy skills, we will help student academic success, and by listening to student voices, we will help students feel connected to reading.
Help us help our students become the readers we know they can be!
More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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. Paradise and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
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