Classroom Library Building

Funded Dec 3, 2013

Thank you so much for your donation to my classroom library. My students were so very excited and motivated to have new books to choose from for their reading adventures. The books are impacting 150 6th grade students in a language arts classroom, and I have a plan in place to extend them to our Title I reading skills classroom as well. As a language arts teacher, I understand the importance of not only teaching students strategies to be better readers, but more importantly to motivate them to read more often and to learn to enjoy reading. I am convinced that this motivation can be created by allowing students to choose the books they want to read. My students are required to read twenty-two books from eleven different genres throughout the school year, but they can select the books they want to read for each. It is awesome to hear them take advantage of recommendations from myself and their peers, and to hear them so excited about the book they're reading that they can't wait to tell their friends.

Receiving these books has been another amazing layer to the motivation I work to build every day, helping me create a community of readers. When I told the students about the possibility for over fifty new high interest books, handpicked by myself, they were incredibly excited! They were even more excited when the books arrived! In fact, they were so excited to get their hands on them and check them out that I had to do a raffle in every class to let ten kids in every hour pick one and check it out, or else they would've all been gone by first hour on the first day!

Since the books have arrived, they are rarely on the shelf, and are almost always in the hands and homes of students, being read and enjoyed. This fact is truly priceless. Unfortunately, in a world of high stakes testing and low education funding, many of my students come to me with reading as an extremely negative experience. Years of being forced to read and answer questions repeatedly, to keep stringent reading logs that are often made up, and being forced to read class novels they didn't enjoy and complete meaningless busywork to prove they read have ruined their perception of reading. They see reading as a horrible chore. I am faced with the overwhelming responsibility and at the same time exciting possibility to change their minds, and I see it happening every day. When my children are allowed to choose what they want to read, when they see their peers realizing that reading can be fun, and when they find their "soul book" as I call it, their minds are truly changed. They read more often, and all of the goals of meaningless reading test prep are accomplished just by their attitude being changed. Their reading skills still increase, even when they're reading just for fun, because reading is just like anything else in life, it takes practice to get better. I still teach them reading strategies, but it's with the purpose and attitude of knowing that we enjoy reading, that reading is valuable, and we're learning these strategies to get better at what we love to do rather than just to score better on a meaningless test. You see, my goal is something much bigger than just having a stock of books on my shelves, and your donation has allowed me to work towards this amazing achievement. Thank you.”

With gratitude,

Mrs. MacDonald