Our wonderful school in East Portland is in a very culturally diverse neighborhood with 95% of students qualifying for free/reduced priced breakfast and lunch. It's a challenge to begin school when your life experience and academic readiness may make things harder for you and may have already put you behind those in more affluent neighborhoods. Even with difficult circumstances, my students are amazing and fantastic little people! They teach me the value of perseverance and kindness every day. All of the teachers in our school do their best to give our students a safe, comforting and highly engaging school experience each and every day.
My Project
My students currently have floor seating and standing options for working, but we only have traditional plastic chairs for the regular tables. They are hard to sit on for a long time and also don't help those kiddos that seem to be driven by an internal energy which often comes out in non-productive ways. I have so many of these students that simply need to move more and seats that wobble will help them to do just that. They can truly wiggle while they work!
Our reading table is particularly in need of some better seating options, because we have to sit down to do a lot of very important work there together every single day.
At this table, the children are working on reading as well as writing, math, science, assessments and art in small groups with me. Not only will these wiggle seats help the students that need to move around more, but the novelty of the chairs will be an extra bonus because it will also entice many students over to the reading table so they too can have a turn with the special seats.
Of course, we would also have the option of swapping out some of the other chairs in the room with these wiggle seats if we found a student needing a little bit more wiggle time doing seat work in other spots in the room. All the way around, these chairs will benefit all of my sweet students that could work much more easily if their little bodies didn't have to "sit still" everyday.
More than half of 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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