Share the Gift of Reading with Eager Bronx Eighth Graders

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 so proud of my eighth-grade students at M.S. 118 in the Bronx--after months of learning to read silently and independently in class, they have come to really enjoy and appreciate reading. Most of them will finish twenty to twenty-five books this year, which is a huge accomplishment given that many of them did not finish more than five the previous year. Now our only problem is that with so much enthusiasm from the students, we are running out of books! Because I was hired as a last-minute eighth-grade teacher in a school with little funding, my classroom library is very small. Most of my students cannot afford to buy books on their own, and only a few even have public library cards. I have had to spend hundreds of dollars of my own photocopying chapters of books and buying books. I even purchased a class set of Sharon Flake's, "Money Hungry" with my own money because I was so desperate to read a novel as a class. (It was so worth the cost--they loved it and it was a huge community builder!) Still, we are lacking what most classroom libraries have--high interest, low-reading-level books for teens. I would love to start literature circles with my students as soon as possible, where a small group of four students can read and discuss a book at their level. It is my dream to get my students to the point where they are leading discussions in small groups about books they are reading, but it is impossible to do this without multiple copies of high-interest books at a variety of reading levels. If this proposal is granted, it will completely turn my library around from a collection of battered, random books to a place where my students will be excited to explore. This donation will touch and inspire sixty-two bright and hard-working students and will enable them to read and discuss together and learn from one another. (Literature circles are also an incredibly powerful community builder). New books will not only increase and sustain their new-found love for reading, but will also allow me to do some of my very best teaching. Thank you for considering my proposal!