Who doesn’t love Donors Choose? My coteachers and I have enjoyed many wonderful classroom
resources funded by the generosity of Donors Choose donors. We have a very active parent community,
but not everyone can donate lots of money so this website is a great way for us
to rally together a lot of parents who can only donate a small amount of money
and together they can fund the project.
We’ve also gotten lots of money from generous donors we don’t know whose
care for my students is so appreciated and I wish they could see how much the
kids LOVE what they have given us.
Most recently, my coteacher and I had a Donors Choose gift
card burning a hole in our pockets so we posted a listening center project
with a iPod, listening library, headphone splitter, and classroom set of
headphones. We had a few donors
who we appreciate, but one extremely generous donor paid for more than half of
the project and so my dear little kindergarteners were writing her thank you
notes to show their appreciation.
You can see that even this task was differentiated (because
we don’t really have any assignments that aren’t differentiated!). Some notes had pre-written sentence
starters to reduce writing demands and some were blank to offer more creativity
in the students’ responses. We also provided a variety of art materials (stickers, dot markers, crayons, etc.) so that students could all create a beautiful card even if they don't feel strong in their drawing abilities.
Among all of the many state and common core standards, in the middle of our reading curriculum and math curriculum, between preparing for the carnival and preparing for student led conferences - it was so wonderful to take some time out to teach the kids to be grateful when other people do wonderful things for us. The kids couldn't believe that this woman named "Deborah" would care so much about them as to buy all of these great supplies.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
Adie
How did the ipod work out? Do you think it would be better than trying to get an entire cd/casset/ipod dock as a grant?
ReplyDeleteI love having the iPod. The CDs are so hard for kids to manage and they always seem to get lost or scratched. The kids are very responsible with the iPod and it is so flexible for other purposes in the classroom (music for body breaks, content area audio, etc.). The iPod nanos are relatively inexpensive option so it was a great choice for our class. Let me know what you get!!!
DeleteAdie