Funded Oct 3, 2019Thank you for providing my students with rich engaging texts in the subject area of social emotional learning. Supporting student's social and emotional development can be challenging, but with your generous donation of texts on various social emotional skills my students are well on their way to develop many social skills that they lacked. I was able to integrate different social skills as well as academic skills using these texts. For example, one of the most important social skills a child can learn is empathy. With the text You, Me, and Empathy my students learned how important it is to be able to understand how their peers are feeling and how to help them feel better. They made a connection to Quinn, the main character in the story. They refer back to Quinn when they encounter a classmate who is not demonstrating empathy. As far as academic skills go, my students learned to identify the story elements of a literature text and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in a text (CCSS RL.2.10). I was also able to introduce text connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world) during this read –aloud.
My students were very engaged and continue to be engaged due to the rich meaningful content and the vivid and beautiful illustrations in all the texts. This allowed them to ask questions, discuss, and ask for help in many situations. Also, they were able to recognize and have a conversation about times when their actions affected their peers and how to confront situations in a healthy manner. Another way your donation helped my students is by allowing them to read about characters who face the same challenges and demonstrate the same emotions they encounter.
In our classroom, reading takes place in many forms. Students have opportunities to read-to-self, read-to-someone, or listen to reading. The texts that were generously donated have been used in many read-alouds during our mini lessons. My students also choose to put the books in their book boxes to have them available to read during read-to-self or read-to-someone. They have enjoyed them so much that they ask to have them read more than once during teacher read-aloud. They have also asked to take them home to read to their younger siblings or to have a text to read for their reading log homework.
There is not one single student who has not enjoyed reading these social emotional texts. All the texts have such vivid and beautiful illustrations that even those of my students who are in the early emergent reader stage have had an opportunity to enjoy them. They are able to follow the story by referring to the pictures and by reading the words that they are able to read independently.
Thank you again for providing my students with these engaging social emotional texts. Your donation helped my students reinforce various social skills and develop social skills that they needed in a fun, engaging, and educational manner. Above all these texts helped them instill a deeper love of reading.”
With gratitude,
Mrs. Villela