I need to take a Spanish class to give my students a teacher trained in Spanish who can speak their language!
$888 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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.
Bienvenidos a mi pagina de Donors Choose! This is my tenth year teaching and my sixth year teaching ESL Second Grade. I teach in a Level 1 public school on the northwest side of Chicago. Approximately three-quarters of students at this Title 1 school come from low-income families, but that should not prevent my students from having equal access to resources and receiving a quality education to take them far in life.
Many of the students who come through my classroom are English Language Learners (ELLs), most of whom come from Spanish-speaking households.
In fact, more than half of the students at our school speak Spanish. This means that many of their families speak Spanish, making it difficult for me to correspond with them at parent-teacher conferences and through school-home correspondence on a day-to-day basis throughout the school year. I have tried to use the little Spanish I have picked up, but my correspondence could be more productive if, during conversations with my students and their parents, we could all elaborate our ideas and fully understand what is being said!
My Project
I would like to take an online introductory Spanish course that will provide me with the basic conversational Spanish and the fundamentals of the Spanish language. It is my hope that this course will help me brush up on the Spanish I had in high school and lay the groundwork for advanced Spanish courses I take in the future.
Building a solid foundation in Spanish will aid in my comfort and increase my confidence with the language that will enable me to communicate in Spanish on a professional level with my students and their parents in class, in daily home-school communication, and during parent-teacher conferences.
There are often times when I am teaching in English that I then try to reiterate the idea in Spanish for those students who could benefit from hearing it in their native language to increase comprehension. There are times when I can do this, but when you don't have a full grasp on the language, it makes it difficult the other times. It is believed that students' cognitive ability improves when they have two languages under their belt and how advantageous would it be for all students in my classroom to be exposed to a second language, whether it be English or Spanish!
After taking the introductory Spanish course, I will be able to continue using strategies that benefit English Language Learners, but I will also be able to better help a large number of those learners specifically by incorporating their native language into use in the classroom. This Spanish course will also increase my cultural awareness, which in turn will help me infuse cultural diversity into my teaching. Maybe then students will have a better understanding and acceptance of others.
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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. Mamola and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
