The Kite Runner For All Students

Funded Mar 9, 2016

Firstly, I would like to thank you for your generous donation which has reached a total of 120 10th grade students in an inner city school. Our students come to us with an array of academic difficulties, almost 90% of them are at or below the poverty line and the idea of someone giving them a book to read, discuss, work on in class and then keep, is absolutely foreign. Due to your generous contribution, students can take the book home to complete small reading assignments but its dominant use is in the classroom. Students highlight sentences, annotate, look up unknown words and jot the definitions in the margins. They reference the book when discussing thematic questions and during our socratic seminars (which we will have once we have reached about the middle of the book).

As of now, we are completing chapter 13 of our book and students have been enjoying the book tremendously. They are reading ahead of the assigned chapters and share their enthusiasm during our class conversations. Students were initially shocked when we told them the book is theirs to keep and just spent a good 2- minutes touching it, reading the blurb..fingering the chapters and the skimming through pages. They still feel uncomfortable about annotating/highlighting their book as they have been repeatedly told that they are not supposed to write in their books. I remind them that the book is theirs to keep and by annotating we are interacting with the book.

In regards to skills taught through this book we have been focusing on author's use of figurative language, characterization, themes (betrayal, redemption, father-son bond, impact of friendship as well as class issues in Afghanistan). In addition to the aforementioned, we learn the definition of unknown vocabulary words by examining the context in which the words appear and decipher meaning without the help of a dictionary.

Everyday students come to class excited to read the next chapter because they enjoy the story plot and the suspense it creates. I usually read the book to them as their reading fluency needs improvement but occasionally we conduct "pop corn" reading and have students read segments of the chapter out loud. We stop every so often to pose questions depending on the scene and have whole class conversations.

There are many students who have come to me saying "this story is so good!", "I read the next chapter!". Lastly, A student mentioned the other day that he is reading the book along with his brother who is slightly older and they are both enjoying it and bonding over reading it together.

Once again thank you for your generous donation that has impacted so many students' lives!”

With gratitude,

Ms. Klidonas