The Distance Between Us and the Latino Student Experience
Help me give my students the opportunity to see their own culture honored in a piece of literature in our curriculum. This book is a story that reflects the life experiences of many students.
$631 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.
My students are primarily first-generation Latino immigrants. These dedicated students show up to school on time each day and learn content-skills and the English language simultaneously at the high school level. This is not an easy task! While learning how to put sentences together, students are also comprehending 10th-grade literature. On a typical school day, students come into my classroom and start a Do Now which consists of practicing the use of subordinating conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, appositives and other writing techniques to create complex sentences about the text we are currently reading. Then students listen to the audiobook for the text. This allows students to access the high-level texts at a better rate than if they were to read it on their own. Audiobooks also permit students to hear the pronunciations as they read along. Students usually collect textual evidence to answer an essential question for the day. After reading, students receive a mini-lesson on a writing technique and then the rest of the class is used for independent application of the technique to their own writing. I am continually inspired by the perseverance my students show not only in the classroom but in their lives.
My Project
The Distance Between Us is a book that mirrors a lot of the life experiences my students have had. The story includes a lot of cultural references as well as common Spanish folklore and phrases that highlight the culture of my students. My students light up when they read this story. It both validates and honors their culture and experiences. Without this book, I do not have the opportunity to bring many Latino authors into the classroom to support my students which, I believe, is essential in any English classroom. Learning should be fun, engaging, and relatable. A unit using The Distance Between Us would allow for all of these necessary components of a classroom.
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