Third Grade Knows the News!

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.

Inspiring through current events. That is my goal for the 2009-10 school year. My third grade students are mostly low income at a Chicago public school, and boy do they have the drive to learn, LEARN, LEARN!

Keeping up with current events can seem like the last thing a teacher has time for. However, I plan on integrating current events magazines for kids (along with their corresponding websites) with my reading instruction this year. Having the magazines will allow my students to gain a wealth of knowledge, understand the world is our community, and allow them to have age level appropriate reading materials to take home. This will also bridge the home-school connection by helping students to spark conversations around the dinner table. There will be different topics weekly which will create new discussions for parents to partake in, while allowing the children to be excited about their writing homework and learning to create extended responses.

Using Weekly Reader and Time For Kids, their on-line quizzes, and the take home book bags will allow students to keep updated on world news, while giving them a real life topic for learning. Instead of just writing a retell of the same old children's books, they will be comparing and contrasting political parties, discussing space travel, or learning about the current crises in the environment. Using the see through book holders will allow my students to transfer the magazines, their folders, and notebooks back and forth from home to school. Keeping organized is one of our biggest challenges that we try to overcome in third grade. utilizing all these tools will really create a class of excited learners who now have the tools to think critically about important news and events. Unfortunately, my school is over 80% low income and participates in the free&reduced lunch program. Just getting the needed school supplies can be a struggle for some families. We tried to buy half the magazines that we needed last year so that the students only needed to come up with half the money, but sharing was not a good way to go about using the mini magazines.

Everyone of my third graders will be so grateful to receive these wonderful gifts as a donation to our 2009-10 school year. It would really help us to enrich our reading by using meaningful subjects that can make us better members of our community and society as a whole. Please know that we are asking for a handout, but the benefits will be in the smiles on our 8 year old faces!