My students need watches with a stopwatch function to enhance their training.
FULLY FUNDED! Mr. Kotung's classroom raised $168
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.
My Students
Many challenges exist for children from high poverty middle schools, but that hasn't stopped ours from being successful runners. Our running team is a family that is rich in passion, drive, and sheer determination! Traditional teams have tryouts, but our team family is open to everyone. That's why we have a very diverse group - 6th graders, 7th graders, 8th graders, returning high school alum, males, females, chubby, thin, outgoing, reserved, plays other sports, doesn't play other sports, excels in school, struggles in school.
Our runners graduate from our team learning that winning is simply a bonus - the key is to improve and use your mental strength and character skills to achieve the best possible version of yourself.
Although we have won numerous team and individual awards, we pride ourselves in each runner improving significantly as time passes on and them gaining confidence in their abilities to achieve a tough goal. We train our runners to run starting at the mile distance all the way up to 13.1 miles as an 8th grader.
My Project
Our amazing running team now has over 60 middle school students and about 20 alum who still run races with us. Because of that, we need more wrist stopwatches to enhance their training.
We need more wrist stopwatches for students to use.
What we discovered is that giving students time splits and goals during their training and for races are essential to improvement and performance. For example, when we do half mile intervals for training, we provide time splits for each of our runners based on their ability level. It pushes our students to run a good time and know what's actually a good or bad time. Another example is that for races, we give our students splits too. For example, we have an upcoming 1500m road race. There is a turnaround where the first 750m and last 750m is the same path. We calculated splits for each of our runners at the halfway point and their projected finish time. Our runners will wear stopwatches (we don't have enough for each of them) and write the splits on their hands to track their own progress. Being self-aware is key.
Because they realize how important times are in their training, many of our runners have purchased watches on their own and still continue to use them when in high school.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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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. Kotung and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
