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Ms. Mora's Classroom

  • Bear Gulch Elementary School
  • Rancho Cucamonga, CA
  • More than three‑quarters 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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Past projects 6

  • Love Those Poems!

    Funded Oct 11, 2023

    It was thrilling to receive the sequel to "Love That Dog" so that my students could continue to follow the story of Jack as he learns about poetry and how to express himself as a poet. Poetry is notoriously hard to teach, and many students start off like Jack, not getting the point of poems. Love That Dog and Hate That Cat are so wonderful because the text is at a level that allows all students to access it and because they each have an appendix with copies of the poems Jack is learning about throughout the novel. I use those same poems Jack is learning about to teach the elements of poetry: imagery, rhythm, meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, symbolism, metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, and mood. Instead of teaching several poems in isolation, these novels function as a great framework for the study of poetry. Students can identify with Jack as he learns all these techniques, too.

    This year, I have several students who have never been introduced to any poetry before, and they are absolutely loving discovering the amazing ways poems can sound and look. The novels written in verse are also fun for them because they are so different from the other novels we've read before. Finally, they are absolutely loving annotating the poems with post-its about their own feelings as they read them. These books make teaching poetry a joy. We're also really enjoying the new poetry anthologies that are giving us access to even more poems! Thank you so much again for your generous donations.”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

    This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose Community & an Anonymous Partner and 8 other donors.
  • Wiggle Seats for the Win

    Funded Sep 11, 2023

    My students absolutely love the wiggle seats that your generous donations provided. Since we received them, the students have been very good about rotating them throughout the day; they take turns using them because they all love the feeling of being able to move around in their chairs without actually moving. The first day that they came in and discovered that our wiggle seat supply had quadrupled, they all cheered and immediately distributed them out to our different table groups. Students at each table have developed a fair system for sharing them. When other students visit our classroom (for reading groups or Student Council meetings), they immediately want to use them, too, and want to know how they can get some for their own classrooms!

    The wiggle seats are so impactful for our classroom community because we have several students with ADHD, and those students used to move in unsafe ways, such as leaning back or rocking in their chairs. Those types of movement often resulted in them falling to the floor. Now that we have the wiggle seats, students are no longer falling and hurting themselves. Between these excellent tools and our two standing desks, our class is much more focused. Thank you so much!”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

    This classroom project was brought to life by Panda Cares and 4 other donors.
  • Historical Fiction to Support Social Studies

    Funded Aug 3, 2023

    Thank you so much again for the class sets of historical fiction to teach about the American Revolution. The students are so much more engaged when they can learn about the history through the lens of a suspenseful story filled with intriguing and relatable characters. Beyond learning about literature (plot, characterization, theme), students can really absorb and retain historical facts so much better within the framework of a novel. Because they are invested in the story, the students have a way to connect to the historical events that is much more natural than trying to memorize more isolated information from a social studies textbook.

    Reading in our classroom is a peaceful and fun part of our day. When we take out our novels, you can actually see the students settling in for a good story. We often listen to the audiobook version of the novel as we follow along in our hard copies of the text, especially if the audio version has background sound effects of any sort. Otherwise, I read the novel aloud to the students, pausing from time to time to allow the students to chorally read the next word, phrase, or sentence. Students become very invested in the narratives and participate actively in our novel discussions. After each chapter, in addition to analyzing the text, we complete activities in our interactive social studies notebooks to process the history content standards that we are learning.

    Both my advanced and struggling readers very much appreciate our novel studies because the way that we read and interact with the text is accessible to everyone. The advanced students learn new vocabulary and more about the craft of writing while the students who are below grade level have access to the discussion and content through the read-aloud. Learning history through the context of our novels makes it easier for all students because the social studies textbook is not accessible to my struggling readers or English learners. We all really appreciate the opportunity to study history in this wonderful way.”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

    This classroom project was brought to life by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and 5 other donors.
  • Where Have All the Pencils Gone?

    Funded Aug 2, 2023

    My students are making great use of the pencils, erasers, and headphones that you so generously provided for our classroom. We keep stocked table boxes for each group of four or five students, and our student supply monitors replenish them weekly. Gone are the days when students are constantly searching for pencils, or sitting idle because they do not have the supplies they need. Now our classroom is running like a well-oiled machine!

    The students take their job of refilling the supply boxes very seriously, and they are doing a wonderful job of keeping the pencils sharpened and putting eraser caps on the ones with worn-out erasers. We've never been able to make it this far into the school year without running out of pencils and erasers before, and the students and I are extremely excited about that. Having an adequate supply of basic learning materials is so important to keeping the students productive.

    As we move into the second trimester, the students are working on writing narratives, and for November, we'll also be participating in The Great Thanksgiving Listen with StoryCorps. We will be putting the headphones you donated to great use with this project. Thank you so much for giving us this wonderful opportunity to participate!”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

    This classroom project was brought to life by Kleenex and 4 other donors.
  • Inspiring Young Authors with High-Quality Read-Alouds

    Funded Aug 10, 2022

    My class is absolutely loving our beautiful new read-aloud books. We are featuring many of them in a writing program called Mentor Sentences that we're using on a weekly basis. This program uses excellent example sentences from high-quality books to serve as models for students to discuss, analyze, diagram, revise, and then imitate. The students use the sentence of the week as an engaging way to study elements of writing such as grammar, punctuation, and figurative language, and then practice those same techniques in their own writing.

    On the first day of the week, we read the entire book aloud. The students love having picture books read to them, even as fourth graders, because they enjoy the different stories and especially the illustrations. We discuss the book and its theme as a whole on Day 1. Also on Day 1, we examine one particular sentence from the book and talk about what we notice about the sentence. What kind of a sentence is it? What techniques does the author use? Is there interesting or new vocabulary? On Day 2, the students diagram the sentence. When we began this program a couple months ago, the students always needed my help to identify the different parts of speech, but now with the weekly practice, they are pros at it! On Day 3, we revise the sentence by adding more detail. Finally, on Day 4, the students construct their own sentence that mimics the style of the original author. The more we practice this, the better the students' writing is becoming across the board. The students are gaining so much confidence as readers and writers!

    My class is enjoying these new books immensely. After the week is over, I leave the book of the week propped up in our library at the back of the room, and the students take turns borrowing it and rereading it. They are just loving these wonderful picture books and we are getting so much great use out of them. Thank you so much for making this program possible for us (and the other two fourth-grade classes who are doing the same)!”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

    This classroom project was brought to life by Bill Gates and 6 other donors.
  • Watercolors for Expression & Connection

    Funded May 7, 2022

    My students and I are loving our new watercolors. The students were SO HAPPY to do "real art," as they call it. We haven't been able to paint over the past few years because our school has not budgeted for any art supplies and we do not have an art room or an itinerant art teacher. The only painting was really done in kindergarten, but not beyond that unless teachers happened to get individual grants. The students have been starving for art beyond just crayon or colored pencil drawings. The opportunity to express their creativity through painting is so helpful for the students who struggle in other academic areas, and it gives them a chance to stand out in ways they cannot otherwise do throughout the school day. Art is also a time when the students can let their guard down and have informal conversations with classmates that they don't generally have during the core subjects.

    When the students first saw that they would be using watercolors, they were ecstatic. All day long they kept asking, "Is it time for art yet?" And now that we've done a few lessons, they ask, "When are we painting again?" because they love it! Your donation is also reaching even more students than I originally projected for because this year I have the special day class students and the students from a county deaf/hard of hearing class mainstreaming to my room for science, social studies, and art, so those students have been benefiting from the materials, too, and they absolutely love coming over to our class for painting.

    We've been using the watercolors for both standalone art lessons (sketching and then painting fall leaves) and to support our social studies curriculum. Several weeks ago, as we learned about the four regions of California, we took notes on the mountain region and then did watercolor paintings of a mountain scene (a waterfall such as you'd find in Yosemite). We plan to do a different watercolor painting as we learn about each region in detail, so we'll be working on a desert landscape next, and then scenes from the Central Valley and the coast. The students are really starting to get the hang of mixing colors now, so their paintings are getting more detailed and sophisticated.

    Thank you again so much for your generosity. The students and I really appreciate the opportunity to benefit from painting.”

    With gratitude,

    Ms. Mora

About my class

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