Funded Sep 12, 2017This semester has flown by! It was my first semester of my first year of teaching, and I can't believe how much my students and I have grown. We just finished a new round of MAP reading growth testing, and I am happy to say that nearly every student in my class made substantial progress toward their growth goals for the year!
All of my students love to read. Every morning after breakfast, we have an hour of Guided Reading time where I pull small groups for 20 minutes at a time to read challenging passages while the other class independently reads books on their individual levels (including the books YOU have donated!). In our small groups, we focus on developing skills like deducing the meaning of new vocabulary based on context clues, analyzing characters, summarizing, and identifying themes. Developing these skills helps the students glean more from their independent leisure reading and build confidence in their fluency and comprehension.
Beyond the benefit that your donation offered my students in the form of interesting new material to read independently, they were thrilled and astonished that strangers who don't even know them would be so caring as to invest in their learning. They were convinced at first that I had secretly bought all the books myself! Your generosity and belief in them has inspired a greater sense of social appreciation, purpose and belonging in our classroom culture that cannot be understated. Despite widespread fears of reduced government funding, I have faith that with the help of donors like you who are invested in our schools and our kids, there is much hope for the future of education in our country.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Hadeed