This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
I teach First Grade in a challenging college prep charter school in Los Angeles, CA. My students are smart and love to work hard and be challenged.
My students love to read and write. At times for a class reward I will put on a movie but I always have multiple students ask me if they can read or write instead. I want to take their natural passions for reading and writing and pair that with the phonics, reading comprehension, writing, and fluency skills to improve daily. I can ask parents to provide these specific notebooks but when that is not a reality our students should not be limited or held back.
My students each need a composition book that will serve as their reading notebook and their own spelling dictionary. We also need two spelling dictionaries.
We will use the reading notebook to write down our high-frequency words, phonics strategies, comprehension strategies, thinking maps, comprehension answers, and everything else that has to do with reading. It will provide one place for them to look back on all their reading skills.
The spelling dictionaries include common high frequency words for them to look up and spaces for them to write in their own common misspelled words. I cannot tell you how many times students want to write story after story about the same thing, for example their scooter, but they need to ask me each week how to spell scooter. With these dictionaries I can have the students write scooter in their own dictionary and each time they want to write about their scooter they can look it up. Their writing will no longer be held back by what words they can spell and I will spend less time spelling and correcting the same words for students.
You will help to ensure that my students learn organization, note-taking, and independence. These are all skills that students should not just be expected to know how to do but rather we need to teach them and the earlier the better. If we begin to teach it earlier by the time my students are in high school and college they will be able to focus on the curriculum rather than study skills.
Also, you will be helping the environment because loose paper will not be going home to end up in the trash and I will not need to make as many copies of worksheets that never get looked at again. All the work will be kept in one place that will make a great keepsake for years to come.
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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 Mrs. McKinney and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.