Donors Choose

Grants and classroom funding

Grants

This year I won a Tyler Foundation grant for cameras, USB microphones, green screens lights, camera stands, etc. for students to use to create their own video research project! We just received the materials. More to come later after students complete these projects!

Donors Choose Projects

Donor’s Choose is a wonderful crowdfunding sites for schools.

tions of the these projects and links to their Donor’s Choose page are below. I highly recommend Donors Choose whether you have a project you need to raise funds for or if you are looking to donate to a school or teacher’s classroom.

Field Trips

Take Us to Broadway! – Field Trip to see Wicked performed at Dallas Summer Musical – $1473.31

Spring 2016: This project raised money to send my high school theatre class to see Wicked performed at Dallas Summer Musicals in Fairpark. It paid for tickets and dinner. Click on the link above to go to the Donor’s Choose project page to see more photos from the trip. This was a student lead project- they put together the project for Donors Choose and I posted it. Many of these students had never seen professional live theatre before. Most of their theatre experiences have been school productions and One Act Play competitions. Seeing a massive live performance like this was a great experience for them.

Before the trip students watched the behind-the-scenes on YouTube of how Wicked was put together called Behind the Emerald Curtain. Seeing it will allow them to get a complete picture of the show and an understanding of how a show of this scale is put together. Seeing Wicked live gave my students a wider perspective and a theatre experience that they will not forget! The following year (Spring 2017) I took a group of students to see STOMP. It was only $15 a person so this time students paid for it themselves with drama club covering a portion of it.

Books & Class Materials

I Am Malala Memoir – Class Set $405.76

These books have been used in my ENG 2 courses to incorporate multicultural reading materials into the classroom.  With the “I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World” class book sets my students are able to read it to gain a greater understanding of this amazing young woman and her experiences. It also jump starts a research project into education and freedom of speech issues/debates around the world. This student edition of this memoir has photos and materials that help my students with this project. This memoir helps my students gain a deeper understanding of the middle east and the Islamic communities who are also negatively impacted by terrorism. With world events I think this is a crucial time to encourage students to learn more about this and of brave people fighting the good fight such as Malala.

Reading Survivor – $156.19

I was able to get a set of the I Survived series of books which is high interest for low readers. Students who are normally reluctant readers eat these books up. They provide my students a look at places they haven’t been and interesting parts of history. They are interesting, they are on their level, and these books are motivating my students to keep reading.

Theatre Production Class Materials – $266.02

My theatre class received special effects makeup kits that were used to practice skills such as creating bruises, cuts, wounds, etc. as part of our technical theatre unit. The students had a blast and loved learning this professional skill!

Holocaust Memoirs Class Sets – $365.73

This project gave us class sets of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust. We also received a few books about World World II to help students research the time period. Students read both books to get two perspectives: One from a girl who survived and one from a girl who didn’t. They then researched this period each coming up with their own research questions related to the historic events in the memoirs.

Women in History Research Project – $393.07

This project was for a bunch of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction texts about women throughout history. This allowed students to read across genres. This women’s history project helped expose students to conditions and cultures around the around and within other parts of our own country. This is important as students in this rural school rarely travel far outside of the county. I’ve chosen books about diverse women and books at different reading levels to meet our students needs. These books opened my students eyes to other cultures and expand their views on what roles/jobs women are capable of. This was a spring board into a research project where students developed their own research questions based on the books they had read from this project.

Engaging British Literature Through Comics – $605.31

This project was for two class sets of graphic novels: Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare in comic book form grants students better access to his work by giving them visuals to help them understand his language. It engages multiple forms of literacy and presents Shakespeare in a way that they can relate to and get excited about. We use these graphic novels to examine how Shakespeare has endured and continues to be adapted into different forms (such as this comic book). We also discuss how this comic book adaptation impacts our reading of this play. V for Vendetta by Alan Moore is a prime example of popular culture serving as social commentary in that it continues the conversation in Orwell’s 1984 dystopia- allowing us to tie it into British literature tradition (we will discuss that during this unit). Comics engage students and utilize multiple forms of literacy including print and visual literacy. Using the V for Vendetta comic we are able to tie into larger media (such as the film) and current events (such as how protesters around the world utilize iconography from Moore’s V for Vendetta comic).