My students need a Rive Ray Box (parallel light beam generator) to study reflection and refraction.
$231 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.
Our school serves an urban, low income population of recent immigrants who are classified as English language learners, or ELLs. These young people are from diverse nations, religious faiths and life experiences.
Some enjoyed consistent schooling in their own countries, while others had their education interrupted by civil war, famine and economic disruption.
The common thread they share is our school, which brings this unlikely community together to learn, grow and work towards their own version of the American dream. One challenge in this context is making science authentic for kids ‘where they are.’ Science can be an abstract concept for native English speakers, and the vocabulary creates a significant barrier between these kids and their understanding of nature. To meet this challenge, we rely heavily on hands-on experiences that both provide kids a chance to develop new science understandings and a situation for building a rich English vocabulary.
My Project
Given reduced school budgets, we are feeling pressure to trim rather than increase the types of materially rich classrooms we know can engage and inspire young people. Each Fall, a number of students volunteer to give up a 'study hall' period to enroll in an additional science course to study astronomy. This course not only supplements the science courses our school can offer, but it additionally serves as a 'test bed' to develop new curriculum for the eleventh grade physics course. In an observational science like astronomy, kids can experience directly the same fundamental principles that practicing scientists do. In optics, the behavior of light hitting a lens is a fundamental concept which is usually taught using diagrams. I saw the ray generator, and it is an infinitely superior teaching tool for demonstrating and llowing kids to play with the bending of light. With this experience, the principles microscopy, telescopes eyeglasses and binoculars are easily illuminated.
With your support, you can give kids the experience of bending light, and in the process, bring them to new understandings of lenses.
Such hands-on work will not only clarify a little bit of the way the universe works, it will also open their minds to unimagined career possibilities. Please help them build confidence and grow in the skills they will need to pursue further their physical science studies in college.
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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. Finney and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
