Read Aloud and Shared Reading Material for My 3rd Grade Class

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

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.

I am an elementary school teacher at P.S. 109 in the Bronx. The student population at P.S. 109 is 73% Latino and 27% African American. Approximately 95% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. I am very excited about this upcoming school year because I will move from teaching first grade to teaching third grade. Although only two years separate students in first and third grade, third graders have a much greater ability to work independently and think critically. Third graders are transitioning from reading picture books to reading chapter books, from learning their addition facts to learning their multiplication facts. Additionally, these students are faced with taking high-stakes standardized tests for the first time. Although I will be able to reuse some of the teaching materials I have amassed over the past two years, I desperately need quality read aloud books and shared reading material. While attending a literacy institute sponsored by the New York City Department of Education, a literacy consultant introduced me to two valuable resources: Making Meaning and Orbit Shared Reading Charts. Both of these resources are compatible with the balanced literacy model used at my school. The Making Meaning program is a brand new tool for elementary school teachers that brings together the latest research in teaching comprehension with support for fostering students' growth as caring, collaborative, and principled people. The program uses read-aloud books, carefully chosen for nine specific comprehension strategies to be taught. Students listen to and discuss literature in pairs and as a class. They learn that talking about books is a way to understand them. The program is collaborative, interactive, and will help me create a classroom community of readers. Without this program, I will have to dedicate hundreds of hours to looking through books at the public library that support a specific comprehension skill and foster my students' social development. I would rather spend this time working with my students at an after-school program. In addition to the Making Meaning program, I would also like to obtain Orbit Shared Reading Charts. Orbit Shared Reading builds nonfiction strategies through shared reading. The program's enlarged short texts and graphic organizers will enable me to focus on specific reading, writing, and analytic skills with my whole class or small groups. Through shared reading, my students will be able to make connections between the text, their personal experience, and other texts, interpret and use graphic sources of information, and explore specialized vocabulary. The most exciting thing about the Orbit program is that all of the shared reading charts are non-fiction passages; thereby, they would integrate social studies and science into the literacy block. In closing, the resources that I am asking for in this proposal will not just benefit a few of my students. These resources will benefit EVERY single student in my classroom by making her or him a reader that reads for meaning.