Reading Our Way to Success!
Funded Nov 25, 2009Let me start by expressing my profound appreciation for your generosity. I find it both encouraging and inspiring that you share a vision for my students' success. I believe that your actions communicate a very strong message to my students that goes beyond your charity. The message is that there is an entire community of people who recognize the importance of strengthening one's literacy through regular reading.
All of my students have taken assessments that show them their reading level. Each student is aware of the grade level that they are reading on and has set a goal for where they would like to be by the end of the year. On average, my tenth graders are reading on about a sixth or seventh grade level. Naturally, learning this is very frustrating for students. For many of them, their initial reaction is to give up or to lower their expectations. However, through strategic conferencing and team building, I am able to help invest my students into creating ambitious and feasible goals for growth. In the conferences, we identify the importance of reading books that are just above their reading level. Habitual reading is not a part of many of my students' lives, so, as you can imagine, reading on a regular basis becomes an overwhelming and often a scary experience. The amazing variety of subjects and difficulty levels in the books you have provided for my students is exactly what they need to get invested and feel successful in their goals.
As I mentioned in my project proposal, my school is amongst the last of a dying bread of schools that attempts to bring a substantive education to all students in its community without any entrance requirements. We welcome all students. The result is that many students who come to our school have not had great deals of success in middle school or simply were not provided with the quality of education that they deserve. As a staff, we looked at all of the obstacles standing in the way of our students and agreed that literacy needed to be our number one focus. Through literacy we can help students catch up to where they need to be on graduation day. Your contribution puts my class at the forefront of this initiative. Indeed, the success of the literacy push in my class will, in many ways, help us determine how the movement will look in the rest of the school. I cannot wait to see how the focus on literacy benefits my students and eventually my school as a whole. Thank you so much for being a part of this great enterprise. ”
With gratitude,
Mr. Swanson