My students need copies of these transformative texts to expand their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Books like Janesville and I Am Malala will provide students with local and international perspective.
Meet the English Students in my English classes for the 2018-2019 school year! These 120 (or so) students are a driven, creative and clever group looking for new opportunities to challenge their thinking both in and outside of the classroom.
These sophomore and junior students vary from voracious readers to those who find challenges in keeping up with the dense canonical texts of the required classroom curriculum, and it is my goal to help these students build a love of reading by providing them with reading workshop novels within each of their required units of study.
My Project
Moving into the 2018-2019 school year, I am redesigning my curriculum with reading workshops in which students can not only practice the skills of reading and writing to improve literacy, but also where they can actively choose what they read and participate in discussions about the diverse world in which we live.
I am looking for this donation in order to create student-led units which will expose my sophomores and juniors to perspectives outside of their own, causing them to look and think differently about their world and the society in which we live.
Reading these true stories about individuals who have faced great challenge will help my students who have had little adversity recognize and empathize with others, and it will provide a safe platform for those who may have experienced similar adversity to discuss their challenges without sharing more than they find comfortable. These books will also help me to engage in conversations with my students about what it takes to overcome struggle and find success in, what can often be, a challenging world.
As part of this unit, students will be working with groups of peers to study both the message and the mode of communication in each text. By working in small groups, students will be able to focus in and reflect on the stories they are reading and openly share what they find and learn with their small group of peers. These texts will also help to extend the learning we practice as a whole class with skills application to more modern and relevantly meaningful stories. And, because I will pace my classes differently, these materials can be used in rotation to support the learning of all of my students, instead of only a limited selection.
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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. F. and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
