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.
With simple technology, I can inspire by students to document their own learning and involve their parents in the life of our classroom.
I teach kindergarten and first grade (I stay with my students for 2 years) at an urban elementary school. 90% of the students are low-income. 90% of the students are English language learners.
Research has shown that creating a strong home-school connection will improve student learning outcomes. We want our students bringing their home lives into our classroom and their classroom lives to their homes. Likewise, we want parents to know what is happening at school, to become involved in the weekly learning goals of our classroom. Among many other strategies we have employed, including a weekly newsletters and parent education classes on Saturdays, we have built in explicit home-school connection aspects into some of our lessons. Our favorite one is sending home disposable cameras for students to take pictures of their neighborhood during our unit on maps and to take pictures of their families during our unit on families. We have gotten great results but it is too expensive to continue.
However, high-quality inexpensive digital cameras now exist. These cameras are designed with children in mind but will take pictures that will be good enough for viewing and printing. Not only would these cameras fill the need we have for these lessons discribed above, it would also open up many new possibilities for home-school connections. Students could take them on field trips and use them to document other activities we do on a daily basis in our classroom. If a students builds a particularly impressive tower with the wooden blocks or makes something beautiful in art, they can be empowered to take the pictures themselves. I can then post these pictures on the website that I have created for our classroom. If a student has a picture posted, you can be sure that he/she will run home to make his/her parents go to our website. There, the parent will find not only the picture, but many other resources that will strengthen the home-school connection.
Your help will make it possible to take the next step in connecting school and home. As more parents go to the website, the students will be more eager to post more pictures, scan more of their writing, include more videos of their performances. It will grow and grow. The parents will have a better understanding of what their child does during the day. But ultimately, the students will benefit in terms of excitement about school and achievement in learning.
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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 Mr. Cline and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
