Past projects 6
Hands-On Makes Learning Fun
Funded Oct 11, 2023My new materials have been so fun for the students! The rolling cart has made it so much easier for me to provide a wider variety of activities for the students to do during my speech pullouts, and the activities I've been able to add to the rolling cart have been fantastic! My students especially love being able to play with the mix and match dinosaurs, and it allows me to elicit a lot of language from them. One of the favorite activities I've been able to do with my new materials has been hiding the fish and dinosaur counters in sand and allowing the students to search for them. It's a great language activity for all levels of development. And I have several students who request the marble run every time they come to speech, and it has proved to be a fantastic form of positive reinforcement for them to complete their speech work, as well as a great language facilitation tool. Thank you so much for providing my students with these wonderful resources!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle
Reading Is Fun! The End.
Funded Sep 20, 2022Words could never describe how happy I am to have these materials in my classroom! In the preschool, students are not ready to read and comprehend books, but there are so many foundational skills that they learn and develop at this stage. The three most important skills to me are verbal language, phonological awareness skills, and book knowledge/developing a love of reading and book sharing.
My students have absolutely loved playing with the magnetic animals, and it has resulted in an increase in verbal language for many of my students. The phonological awareness puzzles have been fantastic for helping students recognize sounds in words and how these sounds have meanings--if you change them, they result in different words. And my favorite has been the large number of children's books that came in this project. The students have absolutely loved the sensory input they get from the "never touch a" books and the "poke-a-dot" books, which have made even some of my really low functioning students more interested in participating in book sharing activities with me. And many of the children have loved the lift-the-flap books, which has resulted in an increase in book sharing interest as well as an increase in verbal language from many students.
I am truly excited for the changes that I have seen in my students as we have been able to use these materials in class and am so excited that I will have them for all my future classes so I can continue to foster a love of reading and learning for years to come.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle
Make Language Motivating and Fun
Funded Oct 26, 2021I am so incredibly happy to have these new materials to work with my students in speech therapy! There are so many ways that I have been able to use them, and I believe it has added a lot of depth to the therapy I have been able to provide to my students.
The different card decks that I received have been great for helping my students answer the questions I ask them. Many of my students have goals on their IEP to help them improve in their ability to answer various types of "wh" questions. Some of them have a hard time answering the questions with only the question presented verbally, but when I can give them a couple of pictures to choose from, they can choose the right answer, and that gives them a good stepping stone to eventually learning how to answer questions without visual cues.
I have also loved the benefits I have gotten from using the preposition game I received. It's hard to practice prepositions with only pictures because it's a little more difficult to depict various positions in a 2D picture. Having actual objects to place and locations to place them has made a big difference for some of my students in helping them learn how to understand and use preposition words.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of this project has been the SuperDuper Inc Token Towers. Preschool children need lots of motivation to stay on task when they are performing a task that they believe to be difficult or undesirable. I have found that when I can give them a tangible method of seeing how many times they need to perform the task before they are done and can move on to the reward, they are so much more willing to work, and they also seem happier as they do it. Over the past few weeks I have used the SuperDuper Inc Token Towers in multiple different settings, both with individual one-on-one student interactions and even in some small group settings, and the children love it! They love the satisfaction of being given a token to put in the tower and seeing the stack grow and grow until it is full. I have had several students who are usually very reluctant to work, who have been much more willing to work and try when they have had the reinforcement of the tokens. It has been awesome!
Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous donation to this project. Both the students and I love these new materials, and I'm so excited to continue to use them in the future!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle
From Sounds to Words--Learning to Read Rocks!
Funded Aug 11, 2020Oh how I love these new materials that I get to use with my students! This week we had the first opportunity to use them in lessons as shown in the pictures: the children had the opportunity to select different items out of the alphabet tubs or magnet sets, talk about the sounds at the beginning of the words represented by the items, and then place it on the appropriate picture representing that sound. The children responded really well to this activity, and many of them were able to quickly learn how to differentiate between the different sounds we were practicing.
The first time I brought these items out and showed them to the children, they were so excited! They really seemed to enjoy the small, fun-colored, and easy-to-recognize items, and I truly believe it made a difference in how interested they were in the activities we were doing. We will be targeting all the early and mid developing speech sounds throughout the course of the school year, and I look forward to seeing how much progress they make as they use these items to their fullest advantage. Thank you so very much for your generosity in helping me to provide this additional enriching experience to these amazing students!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle
This classroom project was brought to life by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and one other donor.Making Communication Fun
Funded Oct 9, 2019I am absolutely thrilled by these new supplies I have for working with my kiddos! And the children I have been working with have been enjoying them as well! They had already become accustomed to most of the materials that I had been using up to this point, so when I started pulling out new materials that they hadn't seen before, they became excited and eager to try them out. One of the goals I have for myself is to make speech therapy fun enough that the children don't even realize that they are working while they are with me, and having these new materials has helped me do this even more!
The children's favorite new material has been the felt boards on which they can build different scenes and talk about them. They love being able to move the pieces around and make the scene look the way they want it to, and it facilitates numerous excellent language opportunities. They have also been very intrigued by the 3-piece, 4-piece, and 6-piece sequencing cards, and it has been a treat watching them work together to figure out the order in which each card should appear. My lower functioning children love matching the plush animals in "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" to the pictures in the book. The position books provide a wider variety of different prepositional phrases that I can use and practice with the children who have these goals. And the English-Spanish vocabulary pictures are bright and fun and so easy for the children to discriminate and recognize!
My next step is to use the phonological awareness puzzles (depicted in the final picture of my project) in my small group lessons. I will use these to help children increase their ability to hear and recognize the sounds at the beginnings of words, the endings of words, and even the middles of words. There's also a puzzle with rhyming words, which is also something that we work on a lot in the preschool. I'm excited to see the children be able to practice learning these skills, which will be an excellent first step to them learning how to read!
Words cannot express my deepest gratitude to you amazing people for your generosity in contributing to this project. It's people like you that make this level of growth and progress possible. I'm so passionate about these children and their success and am so grateful to have been given the resources to increase their ability to succeed. Thank you so very much for all you do to help our students!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle
We are Learning so Much Through Gross Motor Play.
Funded Feb 21, 2019I am absolutely thrilled by this new cart that I have in my classroom! My co-teachers and I pooled our resources with our Donors Choose projects. They requested a number of new materials that will help our preschool children to develop their gross motor skills, and I requested the cart that would allow us to easily transport them. It makes it so much easier to transport all the materials when we have the cart. Without it we would probably be limited to one or two types of toys each time we go to the gym.
The preschool students were so surprised the first time they saw the cart full of toys. They all asked us what it was for and were so excited when we explained how we would be able to use it. Now we push the cart to the gym with us every day so that the children have access to all of the hula hoops, balls, tunnels, balance beams, alphabet bowling pins, and other toys that we have available for them. I love watching the children run to the cart the moment we enter the room and grab their favorite things to play with. Each item helps develop a different set of gross motor skills, and even social play skills. Children at this age learn so much by how they play, and I am thrilled to be able to give them more opportunities for this learning and growth. This week I used the items in the cart to create an obstacle course for the children, and they completely took off with it. Several of the children went through the obstacle course five or six times in a row, getting better each time they did it. It was wonderful for their cognitive and turn taking skills as well as their gross motor skills. My next goal is to create an obstacle course that will require teamwork and verbal communication skills. I'm excited to see what else we can accomplish with this equipment.
Words cannot express my deepest gratitude to you amazing people for your generosity in contributing to this project. It's people like you that make this level of growth and progress possible. I'm so passionate about these children and their success and am so grateful to have been given the resources to increase their ability to succeed. Thank you so very much for all you do to help our students!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Arielle