Growing Up

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.

My Students

My 6th graders say that they hate reading. I want to change that! I want to begin the year by helping the students read an exciting adventure story that they just won't want to put down. We have no class sets of books except for the outdated textbook that takes the joy out of reading. My students need a class set of the exciting adventure story, Peter and the Star Catchers.

My students are children of the field pickers, the families that spend their days hunched over fields of strawberries, broccoli and lettuces.

These are families that work hard to put food on the table, but they also work hard to keep their children out of the gangs that plague their community. 98% of the students at my school speak Spanish and they are not only learning how to read, but learning how to read in a second language. Because of the achievement gap, many of the students feel like failures in school and often don't make it out of middle school; instead they join the gang lifestyle where nobody judges them on their reading skills. I want to help my students experience success in reading. I want them to know what it's like to love a book so much you just can't put it down. Successful experiences with one book lead to successful experiences with another and so on and so on until they feel like successful students who do not need the gangs to determine their self-worth.

My Project

My wish is for class sets of high interest books to get my students to love reading again. I want to start the year off with every student reading the prequel to Peter Pan called Peter and the Star Catchers. I will be using the original Peter Pan as a read-aloud and then students will compare and contrast the two versions and create their own prequel to a famous novel, such as Charlie and the Chocolate factory, or James and the Giant Peach. The students are going to LOVE Peter and the Star catchers. It has something for everyone - pirate battles for the boys and a female heroine for the girls. The play of Peter Pan, the original, is being performed in a nearby city in October and I also wish to be able to raise enough funds in a forthcoming project to be able to take the students to see this live performance!

With severe budget cuts across the board music, art and theater are almost non-existent for these students whose poverty keeps them trapped in their gang-infested city.

I want to bring books into the class that will inspire them - books that we can make come to life with art, music and theater. I want to bring books into their lives that will take them on adventures away from what they know and see every day - to be inspired to dare to take their own adventures and find that hero within.