We Need Books!

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

My students are very talented, curious, and empathetic children who are faced with the daily challenge of living in the crisis of poverty while learning two languages. My goal is to make our classroom a plentiful space filled with resources for learning and books galore!

I get to work with 22 of the funniest and most interesting third graders I have ever met.

Most of my students are emergent bilinguals who were enrolled in a two way Spanish Immersion program so they could learn content in their native language while learning English as a second language. Our school is Title I with over 85% of children receiving free or reduced lunch. Some of my students live with guardians, many share the same roof with more than 6 other family members, and they lack many basic resources at home. What I love most about my students is that they come to school happy and ready to learn, excited by the smallest gifts. As our school's student population increased, my classroom is a space that had never before been a classroom so we are working together to fill it with student work, their art, and resources to make it more comfortable.

My Project

Our classroom library is scarce, especially when it comes to books that interest my students and will hook them into becoming lifelong readers and learners. The book set would get students excited about reading in both Spanish and English. My students are learning to write complete sentences and some of them are really taking off with writing a full paragraph or a full page. We needed folders for writing and I hope with the colorful descriptive ones I chose students can continue to improve on the writing process. My students will be very eager to use the set of mini whiteboards not just for literacy but also for math practice. I can also imagine the excitement my students will experience when timing themselves and their peers during fluency practice. As a teacher, I would also feel a sense of relief transferring the responsibility to students timing themselves in a reading center rather than using my one stopwatch. Not only will engagement increase, but their overall of happiness too.

This project will make a huge difference in our classroom and the learning of my students.

I know that the children will be so grateful to have folders for writing, whiteboards that will make learning fun and interactive, a bit of technology for improving reading fluency, and a whole set of brand new books of their interest in English and Spanish for our classroom library. These children appreciate every small gift and the smile on their faces when our project is funded will be worth it.