Past projects 2
Book Boost for Becker's Classroom Library
Funded Feb 5, 2020Thank you all so much for your contribution to my classroom library project. These books will help keep our classroom book collection current and relevant to my students. This daily reading time of books of their own choosing means a great deal to my kids and I know this investment will pay great dividends to them in the future.
Thank you so much for believing in us and for supporting us.”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Becker
Writing Like a Pro
Funded Aug 24, 2014As we come to the end of the first semester of this school year, I want to thank you again for your donation to my classroom and my students. With your donations I purchased several items for my classroom: printer ink, multi-colored sentence strips, and a class set of Rick Bragg's Somebody Told Me. My students were thrilled to receive these resources and they made learning so much more fun! Many of my students were surprised at the kindness of strangers and were touched by the generosity we received.
These items are being used daily in my class. With the ink I am able to print individual copies of brief texts to be used in Close Reading activities, a skill which is proven to boost reading comprehension skills. Students can mark and annotate the texts, display them on our document camera, and interact with the text in a way not previously possible with just a textbook. As we are severely limited on copies from the copy machine, this has enabled me to put materials directly in the hands of my students. We use the sentence strips in group activities with a variety of tasks; for example, groups may be given a lengthy sentence, chopped into phrases, and they have to reassemble the sentence in a way that makes sense. Then we can move phrases around, identify appositive phrases, adjectives, adverbs, dependent and independent clauses and other parts of speech. It has been a great way to teach grammar. We also use them to record imagery and figurative language. The copies of the Rick Bragg book have been widely used in both my English II class and my Creative Writing class as students can read non-fiction feature articles from this Pulitzer Prize winning author. The articles in this book have opened up worlds of class discussion on contemporary issues and have provided excellent examples from a skilled writer.
As a result of our use with these materials my students have become better readers and writers. They are now able to better support their ideas with specific textual examples because now they know what to look for in their reading. They now know how to identify important ideas and examples. Their writing is much more effective and the process of writing has become much more fun. My students no longer dread "the essay assignment" because they now have the confidence to express their ideas clearly and effectively.
Thank you again, so much, for your generosity and support of my students!”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Becker
This classroom project was brought to life by Gates Foundation Back To School and 4 other donors.