Help me give my students access to an even-growing shared library of digital books. These are powerful reading machines: each one will launch the reading of a 6th-grade student and keep their reading rising through middle school.
$1,598 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
Middle schoolers have a reputation for hating reading. And our younger generations are said to lack the attention span to sit down to a good book. Our students are here to prove them wrong. Our students are a mighty group of middle schoolers from deep East Oakland who dream, achieve and prepare for success in high school, college, and life. And a big part of that is our school's culture of reading. Our students read books of their choosing in at least one of their core classes each day. They compete to see which grade level can read the most. They smile for pictures when they reach milestones. And they champion their favorite books with one another.
To quote JK Rowling, "If you think you don't like reading, you just haven't found the right book yet." And so we work together at our school to help everyone find just right books.
These are books that are neither too hard nor too easy--books with just the right push. And these are books that match our interests, our curiosities.
My Project
Funding at our district is at a crisis level, low enough that our small school must merge with another to double in size. We want to keep everything that is powerful and special about our school true.
We need to scale up despite resources being spread thin.
A cornerstone of our work is a strong independent reading program. We use Kindle readers to co-create with our students a shared library of digital books. Every time a student gets excited by a new book, we use donated funds to purchase it for them. And we spread the word: up to 5 of their friends can read that same book at the same time, and when they finish, we spread the word to six more. In one year, we see a library balloon to 300 of the books our students most want to read. By the end of their three years in middle school, they'll see that library grow to nearly a thousand. That's a thousand books they have access to at a click.
In times when our library budget is $0, we use these devices to stretch donated dollars to every student via books that are always pristine, never lost. Through the success of this model, we've seen our students' reading double in a year. We want to see it triple, quadruple. Our goal is for every one of our students to read a million words every year. We create life-long learners. We create students who walk in the shoes of hundreds of characters. We create literate citizens ready to tackle the tough texts of adulthood. And we'll expand this work with your help.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Douglas and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
