Billy Andal & The Stache

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Thank you for all of the supplies for my cooking project!  We have made a few different items in class so far.  The students are very excited every time we get to cook.  We will be cooking a few more times before school ends this year.

We made carrot muffins a few weeks ago.  Students were able to add raisins and/or nuts to the batter.  Some students added both, some raisins only, some nuts only and some neither raisins or nuts.  Here's a few of the comments I heard from the students:  "Awesome!"  "Very tasty!"  "Can we make more?"

One of my objectives this year has been to get my students to realize that eating fruits and vegetables may be healthy, but can be tasty.  Your materials help make this goal achievable for me”

With gratitude,

Mrs. Caradonna

This is a note to thank you for your generous contribution to our seventh grade classroom. The balance has enabled my students to explore the metric system, scale, powers of ten, and calculate the calorie content of fruits and vegetables. We used the scissors, t-squares and compasses during our kite building project. The meter sticks are used on a daily basis to measure the height of plants in our indoor and outdoor gardens. The pH meter has proved invaluable in maintaining our small aquaponics system ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJYcpKZz34 ).

This year has been a challenge because we are a project-based, textbook-free school with low classroom budgets. Contributions such as yours make it possible for our students to create real-world products and take accurate measurements during scientific investigations.

Thank you again for helping create students who are successful lifelong learners. ”

With gratitude,

Mr. Davis

Once again, thank so much for your donation. Since our new books arrived to our classroom, reading has become very popular in my classes. My students have become ravenous readers, who just can't get enough books to read. Students are becoming hooked on new genres, authors, and series. They are also very excited about recommending their favorite books to their peers. Consequently, they have wonderful conversations about the books they read and their favorite authors. In addition, students from other classrooms come to me with the hope of checking out one of my books. In their own words, "the eight graders have the coolest books; I can't wait to read those books!"

Literacy is essential to success for their future. These new books support my vision that all students should learn to love to read. When students read what they like, they become self-motivated to learn and to read. They also improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Without donors like you, many youth would never feel the joy of reading. ”

With gratitude,

Ms. Garcia

This year has probably been one of the most challenging and transformative years of my life. It€™s my first time teaching over one hundred and seventy-five students a day, of which one hundred and twenty are my English Language Arts students. And, I’ll remind you; my kids are in seventh grade. William Golding, author of “Lord of the Flies” was a schoolmaster for this age group. He often illustrates the complexities that adolescents experience moving toward adulthood. Because my students are going through such a powerful change, one of the biggest feats is to find what they connect with and what will genuinely engage them. Many of my mentors in the beginning of the year repeated, "€œget into a good book.'

Enter "€œBurro Genius"€. This memoir, as I explained in my project page, documents the life of a Mexican American boy growing up in Oceanside, California during the 1950€'s. Victor Villasenor shares his pains and triumphs of childhood through rich language and earthy humor. Immediately, my students connected on that level. What hooked them the most, however, is that Victor, in seventh grade, determines what the course of his internal life will be for as long as he lives: brave, never to be bullied, powerful, just, noble, proud, perseverant, and grateful to be alive. He is complete role model for my kids.

Not only do they connect with a funny character who offers them a paradigm with which they can navigate their young adulthood, but ha€™s also helped them muddle through some of the adult world realities we impose on them: standardized testing, for one. I'€™ve been able to effectively teach ELA terms like theme, character, and plot through "€œBurro Genius."€ In fact, my kiddos can now write critical and sophisticated literary responses as if they a€™re scribbling off a note. I believe part of the reason they are able to talk about theme so readily is that Villasenor'€™s themes are so accessible, deeply humanistic and relevant to a seventh grade Latino in 2012. On a more mundane level, I’ve been able to teach mechanics such as sentence structure and style with Villasenor'€™s writing.

Another relevant theme I also try to hammer home to my kiddos is that they live in unique era. The fact that I was able to use a hub like Donors Choose to bring an otherwise inaccessible book to my curriculum puts us at a special advantage. These guys are fluent in social media (their desire to post on Facebook all day is like a forbidden fruit), yet they don’t always understand that the Internet is a community, which mirrors our world; humanity spans the spectrum of the puerile to enlightenment.

Your desire to help me bring literature into my classroom exemplifies the best of which the Internet has to offer. Your generosity came to us via this technology, and I never missed a moment to explain to my guys that a community of people near and far to them so generously reached out to help better their education. I truly believe they get it, and moreover, they are now more prepared to become better citizens of this vast community we call the Internet.

I thank you all so much for helping me have a more enjoyable first year teaching and for allowing my kids to have the chance to dig into the best that literature has to offer. My kids have thanked you in the classroom when I told them how we got the books. "You mean they don't even know us and they bought us these?" One student asked. "Yes," I said. There are some amazing people out there in the world. Thank you again for promoting life long literacy.

”

With gratitude,

Ms. Oberlander