My students not only come to school with economic and language challenges, but are facing the struggles of academic learning needs in reading, writing and math. Language AND academic challenges are not easy, but my students work hard every day to overcome the struggles they face due to cognitive and linguistic challenges as well as low socio-economic status. They all receive free and reduced lunch, and face the hardships of high poverty on a daily basis. Our school is located in a suburb, but we are the part of the suburb that struggles the most. We come from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, but our common thread is our desire to learn.
They work hard to catch their same aged peers, and experience success with support from a smaller class size and some multi-sensory learning strategies.
At home, they lack the resources they need to get experience with today's constantly changing technology. We want to become the best citizens we can be, and having access and practice using basic systems such as email, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, as well as other online learning tools will help us be successful, despite our challenges.
My Project
Students in my classroom struggle with the concepts of fractions, decimals and percents. Visuals and hands-on activities are a necessity.
Manipulatives allow my students to better understand the connection between these three concepts through giving them actual pieces to hold.
Although it is applicable to daily life, working with the symbols can be hard, and converting these integers is even harder. The magnetic board with the circles and rectangles gives them a chance to touch and see the connections between fractions, decimals and percents. The activity center will provide a chance to apply their understands through tasks they can complete to demonstrate how deep their understand truly is.
These students need lots of visuals and hands-on activities to master new concepts. The fold and learn geometric shapes will directly benefit my students' ability to understand characteristics of geometric forms. This particular concept is difficult for my students due to how abstract it feels to them at first. The idea of folding out a 3D shape to form a flat shape (called in net, in math vocabulary terms) is very abstract for them. These shapes will give me the chance to show them, without paper, how this happens, and show them what terms such as vertex, and the difference between an edge and a face. I can have them show me, after they demonstrate a clearer understanding.
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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. Roche and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
