My class is looking for donations of books on all grade levels. Please read and pass it on.
Lesson No. 1 at Teach for America bootcamp: Set a big goal for your students.
I realized pretty quickly this summer that your students' big goal creates an even bigger goal for you.
One of my classroom big goals for the year is for our class to read 2,490 books. Because If the achievement gap really is a literacy gap, then my middle school special education students are going to get the most practice possible (and some are practically illiterate). Of course this means I'm furiously studying strategies for reading and constructing literacy centers. And of course this means foraging for books.
For all that I have said about the school's resources, the harsh facts stand true: The nearest public library is 30 miles away and Barnes and Noble doesn't even show up on the map. To counter those minor logistical issues (and the cramped school library most of the kids have been combing through since kindergarten), we're going to build our own classroom library. We'd love your help (and books).
If anyone has children's/young adult books that he/she would like to donate, they would be greatly appreciated. My kids will have access to a lot of supplies provided by the federal government, but individual reading books are hard to come by. Even more rare are INTERESTING, FUN, COOL books. I really need to push literacy in my Special Ed room with a ton of books on all
grade levels (kindergarten to twelfth grade) for my children to choose.
Shipping and Contact
Books can be mailed by the Post Office at book rate, which runs about $1.80 for 3 lbs. Please e-mail me at [email protected] for details and feel free to pass the message/blog along to friends, family or even your entire company. I'm shameless when it comes to getting things for my students.
RAW: Read Around the World
The rough draft of our Read Around the World (or RAW-- please pitch any better reading program titles) is for me, my kids and our community to read 2,490 books in the 2005-2006 school
year. This follows our classroom's global theme: Each book read will represent 10 miles, so once we reach our goal, we would have roughly traveled all 24,902 miles around the world.
In order to mark our work, each student, regardless of skill level, needs to read a book-- individually or guided-- and fill out a short worksheet with the title, author and a one to five sentence summary. When they fill out the worksheet, I will post them around the room. After every 50 books (or 500 miles), there will be an extrinsic reward, whether it involves a lunch party, or each student picking their own book to keep.
Community involvement
But to really drive home the importance of reading, we'll be inviting community members to take part in our RAW challenge. The community RAW will run parallel, but separate to our classroom RAW so students can have a visual tracking system of their own reading statistics. The principal will hopefully participate and log in summaries of her own pleasure books. Maybe the postmaster will too. We'll need to prove to the kids that reading gets you places and that everyone, from the custodian to their teacher, reads.
And that, folks, is our big(ger) goal.
Comments