Past projects 6
Hula Hoops, Snacks and Gratitude Journals: Navigating in Uncertain Times
Funded Nov 4, 2024Students in grade nine have been using self-selected wellness materials as they navigate year one of high school.
Fidgets quiet their bodies, snacks feed them. Hula hoops have been used primarily for team building, though I've heard that hoop rolling might be next.
Journals have been selected and customized thanks to the art supplies.
Chalk and paint markers have enliven our space.
Modeling clay is being used to make gifts for friends and families.
Thank you for trusting teens to chose for themselves.”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil
This classroom project was brought to life by .Cisneros & Reynolds: Writing Mentors
Funded Oct 25, 2023During the 2023-2024 school year, in our credit-bearing, GPA-impacting class, we'll consider works by writers, activists, artists, and scholars, most folks of color, some queer, all heavy weights, in order to sort through what we ourselves are thinking, feeling, and doing in this unprecedented historical moment. We'll frame these texts/artifacts through the intersectional lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality as a way to think, talk, and write about notions of diaspora, mutuality, and possible futures.
As we explore the nitty-gritty particulars of all sorts of texts as they relate to us as individuals and as community members, we will seek to frame our experiences in ways that accurately and compellingly show (not tell) some of where we have been and seek to be.
All sessions will be facilitated by me and us, for us, with on-going support from all of your academic classroom teachers, neighborhood experts, along with writers, thinkers, and makers of all stripes by whom we feel moved.
We will be working in partnership with (among others) The American Folk Art Museum, College Now, Critical Resistance, Future Ready, Parsons The New School, and Word Up Books, as we explore the inter-relatedness of emergent work in ways that (hopefully, deeply) sustain us. We will use New York City as an extension of our classroom and will participate in monthly events that we choose for ourselves and share.
We will analyze, synthesize, and share our understandings as we continue to write and revise a series of weekly reading logs and weekly reflection lists and writers' notebook entries. In each unit, we will curate collections of artifacts as ways to show, deepen, and tune our understandings of how where we have been impacted where we seek to go, informed by what's in our heads, hearts and hands.
Along the way, we'll (hopefully) make and hold space for our emergent considerations of some of our focusing/essential questions and in relationship to enduring understandings.”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil
Desperately Seeking iPads!
Funded Aug 30, 2023Thank you for you thoughtfulness in funding my request for an iPad for communal classroom use. Students have already begun to use to read ebooks and to listen to audiobooks during independent reading.
Students also have shared that they like the idea of being able to use it when they forget a laptop at home or if they forget to charge their own devices overnight.
Thanks, too, for your prompt decision to support our work. I appreciate your trust in allowing us to choose what we need for ourselves.”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil
Fighting White Supremacy on Wobble Chairs
Funded Oct 1, 2021You should see our room now, y'all.
We are all deeply grateful for your thoughtful and generous donations in support of our work here at la escuelita.
This morning, in our crew advisory, students transported, unboxed, built, and tested the bright red wobble stools with delight.
Thank you for considering the bodily integrity of students as they navigate pandemic learning.
Thanks, too, for trusting that we know what's best for us, that the fight against white supremacy takes many forms, that we keep us safe.”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil
This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose Community and 12 other donors.Using Capoeria to Build a Tiny House, Muscles, and Community
Funded Dec 10, 2011It is with considerable gratitude that I write to thank you for your funding of our project that yielded a class set of beautiful books in the service of our project, Using Capoeria To Build...
While we had originally requested tambourines for the art/play of capoeria (which were unavailable, ultimately, via Donors Choose), we are excited to be using the class set of Edwidge Danticat essays that we were able to purchase instead.
The scope of the project has shifted, some, and now circles around notions of power. Our focusing questions include:
What is power?Who has power?
Who seeks power?
How/does power inform multiple articulations of/ notions of history?
Since most students in grade ten study global history and most students in grade eleven study US History and take a dance class (which includes study of dace traditions from the Carribbean in general and West African influences in particular), the study of capoeria as a dance/ martial arts discipline seems a fitting intersection for the accompanying study of implications for triangular routes of trade during the Atlantic Trade in colonies with diverse histories. Students will scratch at this idea of shared yet distinct histories of diaspora through multiple case studies (West Africa/Portugal/Brazil; West AFrica/ France/Haiti on the island of Hispanola; West Africa/Spain/Dominican Republic on the island of Hispanola) as ways to re-consider the Atlantic Slave Trade in the US (West Africa/England/US colonies).
Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, will serve as a text through which students can consider contemporary implications for and the persistent history of diasporic experiences.
Thank you for helping us to move this work forward.”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil
Using a Hoe, Collecting Family Recipes and Junk Art
Funded May 6, 2008Many thanks for your generous funding of our classroom book requests. Students at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School are eager to continue their considerations of the focusing question: What sustains us?
Just today, we visited the Socrates Sculpture Garden in Long Island City, Queens as part of students' fieldwork. There, students considered pieces by working artists (many of them local) who have submitted installations addressing the notion of "Waste Not, Want Not." We wound our way back to school with considerable buzz around ways to push our investigations.
The books you have funded will most definitely serve us in coming months.
Many thanks,
Kerry Mand Justine Thomas
Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning Schoo”
With gratitude,
Ms. MacNeil