My students need high interest books featuring diverse characters and experiences: books they will be eager to grab during independent reading time, and recommend to their friends when they are done!
Students come from all over the city to attend our very special school. Having both a Classical (selective enrollment) and a Neighborhood program means that in any given classroom, there is a range of interests and abilities.
As a language arts teacher, I want my students to infer meaning, to analyze the author's choices, and to be able to justify their thinking with evidence from the text.
Of course, a great book can do so much more: it can bring up deep ethical questions as serve as a springboard for a lively class discussion. As our class explores global issues such as immigration/migration, child labor, and the allocation of the world's resources, students will be able to make connections to many of these books.
My sixth graders are bright, thoughtful, curious, and empathetic. I would like to provide them with good reading material to further develop these qualities.
My Project
When I met my incoming sixth graders last spring, they were excited to tell me about all the wonderful novels they read together in fifth grade. I want to foster their enthusiasm for reading by offering them a well-stocked classroom library full of classics and brand-new titles.
It's important to me that students see the diversity of our wonderful school reflected back at them when they look at the books in our library.
Not only do I want a range of genres and reading levels represented, but I also want students to encounter characters of different races/ethnicities and socioeconomic statuses when they read - just as they do in life.
As a class, we will read many texts together that I assign. However, students' independent reading time provides them with a choice about what they will read. It is also a chance for them to give and get book recommendations from me or from their peers. It's so fun to see a book make its way around the classroom as it gets passed along from one student to the next.
Please help me build a classroom library that my students will be itching to get their hands on!
DonorsChoose is the most trusted classroom funding site for teachers.
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. Dalal and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
