My students need art supplies and annotation tools for their close reading and arts-integrated projects. For our class library, we also need current books with diverse characters and Kwame Alexander's writing workshop resource.
"Can we read outside today?" "No, can we play the connotation word game?" asked a couple of students on Friday. My students know how much I like to create an active space for learning; however, I do not think they realize how happy it makes me that they are fighting over working on reading and writing skills.
While the city of Bentonville is not very diversified compared to its surrounding cities, my class population is diverse and includes both ESL and impoverished students who are at risk of being overlooked in the community.
Although I work in an affluent district, my school is a Title I school that has the majority of impoverished, free and reduced price lunch receiving students in the city.
I teach ESL students who are interspersed with native language learners in my seventh grade English classes. Multicultural awareness is the center of my students' learning. Not only do my students identify with this focus, but they crave learning about the world and people around them.
My Project
This project will provide my students with the materials they will need to take what they have learned from the themes in their books and apply them to the real world by creating protest art and awareness campaigns. Last year students created protest art and made informational posters about the current refugee crisis. However, we were short on markers, colored pencils, glue, and crayons which made it hard for students to do quality work in an efficient way. This year hopefully we can continue doing such projects, but will not have to be held up in our products because of the lack of materials.
The books I chose exhibit conflicts that are current to the race, gender, and immigration conflicts in which my students either need to understand or can already relate.
I also made sure to have annotation tools in the form of highlighters, sticky notes, and pencils so that my students can do close readings of these texts and other class books. Every year, I spend my money on the items mentioned above along with expo makers that my students use on individual whiteboards to do contests, formative assessments, and group work brainstorming.
I also added a binder to store and organize assessments, projects, lesson plans, student work, and professional information for this new year. In addition to getting more organized with our projects, I added Kwame Alexander's writing workshop reference guide to the project so that we can improve our writing projects. All of these items will help me start the school year focusing my time on my students' academic needs rather than class material needs.
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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 Ms. Vammen and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
