Past projects 4
Falling In Love With Nonfiction
Funded Aug 23, 2017Your gift of nonfiction books to our classroom library has made a huge impact on our class. Thank you so much for your generosity. I can honestly report that the students are happily choosing to read nonfiction, something that has not happened in the past, and, in fact, many students are reporting nonfiction as preferable to fiction.
The students arrive each morning around 8:30 and read their nonfiction books for half an hour as they eat their breakfast in the classroom. One student was awed that nonfiction can come in the form of a comic book (graphic novel), others have been moved by reading about World War 2, and the biographies of people like Malala and Einstein have been gobbled up and shared. The students' reading has improved and their knowledge of their world has expanded.
In the afternoon, the students read their fiction books for half an hour. I expected that the students would prefer their afternoon reading to their morning reading, but that hasn't been the case. The students must create book projects in response to either their fiction or nonfiction books and the students more often than not choose to respond to their nonfiction choices. Right now some projects, created by the students, and inspired by the books you bought, are: researching the civil rights movement, writing a short biography of a nonfiction author, writing an essay on the Nazi party during WW2, and compiling a books of facts about miscellaneous athletes that the student has read about.
My students and I thank you for bringing nonfiction to life in our classroom!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Lauterbach
Mindfulness in the Urban School
Funded Jan 18, 2017The first of two courses about mindfulness in education is complete, and I want to thank you so much for providing the funds for me to take this training. Numerous staff members also took the course and the effects are being felt throughout the building.
For one thing, the course has given me a chance to notice, and then relax around, my own tensions while working with children. This mindful awareness, of what I am thinking and feeling, has made space in my heart and mind to see and hear my students and my colleagues in a much more clear and present way. My colleagues have made similar comments. One of the ideas that we studied was of equanimity, and I notice a greater sense of equanimity, as opposed to emotional turbulence, in myself and many of the other adults in the building.
The second half of the course, which will begin soon, will be about how to bring similar awarenesses to our students. These skills, like being able to identify what you are feeling before you react and act upon the feeling, of being able to pause for a moment and breathe, are skills that will help my students for the rest of their lives, should they choose to practice and use them. What an incredible gift to give them, particularly as so many of them live in high-stress environments. So, again, thank you so very much for making this possible for me and for my students.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Lauterbach
Adventures in Nonfiction
Funded Jul 20, 2016To Our Generous Donors,
We are enjoying our books so very much. Nonfiction has never, in the course of my 20 years of teaching, been studied as rigorously and with as much pleasure and interest.
Our Time magazine subscription, and our books about the Constitution, have arrived with perfect timing, too, as we attempt to understand what happens during an election in the USA. Just yesterday we used some of the books to help us understand the electoral college and the students seemed to get it...which is really saying something given how confused many adults are by the system.
We have been using the strategy of "close reading" as we go through our non-fiction. We read, and reread, and reread again. Each time we go through a book we are examining something different: what vocabulary is unfamiliar, and can I come up with a guess as to the meaning if I use context clues? what do each of the pronouns in the book refer to specifically? how do the adjectives change the meaning and significance of a noun, and a sentence? We ask questions as we read like, "What surprises me about this?", and "What does the author assume I know already about this subject?", and "Does what I'm reading change or confirm what I think about this topic?".
So, thank you, so very much, for helping to bring nonfiction to life in our classroom.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Lauterbach
Conventions Convention
Funded Nov 24, 2015I want to thank you again for donating to our classroom project. Your donations have had an enormous impact on my students. The students have chosen to do research projects on certain punctuation, like the dash. They have scoured their independent reading books for quotation marks, ellipses and semi-colons. They have had passionate debates about the best choice of internal punctuation in a particular sentence. Students have randomly exclaimed in delight when they've come across an interesting punctuation piece in a story. I have never, in 20 years, seen students get so excited about punctuation.
The students recently published, within our classroom, a piece of fiction writing. Punctuation was featured heavily in their writing, which is not the norm. Their writing was loaded with quotation marks, dashes and colons. When the students helped each other revise, they made punctuation suggestions. Using the punctuation books that you provided, they were able to advise one another about punctuation choice: "Use this here, and you will add some suspense"...."Try a colon along with all of the commas....it will create a clearer list...". They were excited as they experimented with the power punctuation could have in their writing.
Another project was an in-depth study of the comma. Using the chart paper, markers and sentence strips that you provided, students found interesting sentences in their reading books that used commas. Students then sorted the strips into groups according to the rule they thought those commas were following. Students came up with 6 different rules for commas, on their own, and named the rules things like "The Two Comma Momma" and "The Connecterator". It was particularly fun when the students campaigned for their particular comma rule.
So, again, thank you so very much. Thank you for bringing punctuation alive for my students. They have learned things that will likely be with them a lifetime.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Lauterbach