Past projects 2
Soccer-Loving School Needs Some Gooooooals!
Funded Oct 27, 2023Please accept my most heartfelt thanks for your contribution to my soccer project. It brought such joy into my students' eyes to have something so special to play with at recess. My school doesn't have a lot of resources or a well-funded PTO that can afford to spend limited resources on "extras" like this, but I think it's important for my students to see that they are important and worthy of what kids in other schools have.
The goalies were particularly grateful because they didn't have such a large area to cover anymore and they could actually stop some goals! One of the goalies kept profusely thanking me for the first month; it was so sweet. It has also been encouraging to see how responsible the students have been with taking care of the supplies. They have come to my room each day to get the goals and ball before lunch and recess, and returned them afterwards without a problem.
During these difficult times for schools, people like you restore my faith in the kindness of others!”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Cotter
Reaching the Hard-to-Reach with Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction (EBLI)
Funded Aug 25, 2023As soon as I got access to EBLI reading, I got myself oriented to the massive amount of online materials and began using them with two of my reading groups. One is a group of second graders and the other is a group of third graders who were working on cementing their knowledge of the primary sounds of letters. I like to think that instead of them failing to learn, we had failed to teach them how to read. The traditional way of teaching students to read - print-to-speech - hadn't worked with these kiddos.
My students were quite happy to hear that we were setting aside the traditional structured literacy program that we had been using to try something new. So we got out our white boards and dry-erase markers (all green so there was no fighting about colors) and got to work. EBLI uses a speech-to-print approach to reading. Instead of looking at text and teaching students to associate sounds with the letters or words, you do the opposite - a target sound is linked with the letter or letters that represent it.
I've seen some good results so far. Students who were struggling to remember all of their letter sounds are now working on words with blends. They are starting to become more confident in their reading and several parents mentioned that to me at our recent parent-teacher conferences. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting this project.”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Cotter
This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Supporter and 14 other donors.