Blog Post 6- Module 4- Community Toolkit

Getting along with my students? Easy! Now finding common interests between my students and our classroom community… NOT so easy. I find it incredibly hard to even put on a movie for the students that even HALF of them agreed on. Finding interests in our classroom is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Now combining our classroom, myself and the community around us = quite the challenge. In my classroom… and I'm sure any fifth grade classroom, we struggle with getting along. My students have been together since kindergarten so they all know each other very well. I have done a positivity project and second step in my classroom in HOPES of helping them get along. Do you think it worked? NOPE! I think for this project that will meet the interests of all our needs would be something to do with animal shelters. Syracuse is full of animal shelters that all have animals in need. In this project I will ask students to use their Chromebooks to make digital flyers for donations as well as use paper and coloring utensils to create flyers. Students will need to research facts about animal shelters in our area. Kind of like the ASPCA commercials that all make us cry. Their goal of these flyers is to make them sentimental and heartfelt to grab the attention of whoever is walking by. This would grab their attention because Hsu states, “The "e-generation" is strongly motivated by the integration of technology” (2017). Luckily, our school is attached to a REC center that the community is allowed to use. We can put up flyers and posters all throughout the school, community center, and even on the road that lots of people drive by. This project will take a lot of teamwork from me all the way to my students. They will be asked to work together in groups of 3 or 4. Each group will have a different design or task that they need to complete together. Sharing ideas and accepting criticism from one another allows for disagreements and opportunities for me to step in and help mediate the scenario. Lynch stated, “From this point on, the council meeting discus-sions shifted to specific community challenges, such as gangs, violence, pollution, racism, “messed-up homes,” and drugs. Students wrote their ideas and questions related to these issues in their journals and then decided to create a group project. It wasn't until Mohammed prompted them to think about other people's perceptions of them and their community that, as a class, they knew what their project would focus on” (Lynch, 2021). I found this extremely helpful and a possible start to this project. What if we took the time to do this during one of our morning meetings? Could we then read off everyone's sticky notes and have a fish-bowl discussion about what some of them said. Allowing students to discuss and question thoughts will help us have a solid base for this project.

This will be a huge interest of those in my class because we have all talked about how much we love animals. Believe it or not, everyone in my classroom has some sort of pet that they adore. It is of interest to me for many reasons, but one being that I can see them working together and finding common ground is what will make my teacher heart happy. Some roles will be putting up the posters and discussing where in the community we will put them up, some roles will be the flyer makers, some roles will be organizing where we will put all the donations, another role will be which animal shelters (or only one) will we be donating to. There is a lot of planning that goes into this. We could even discuss in social studies the aspect of animal laws and animal cruelty to help them understand how much these animals need our help. In math we can discuss how to track donations and use grouping to put them into different categories. Now how can we incorporate more literacy than we are? What if students wrote letters to potential donors or even classrooms in our school to get them encouraged! On the flip side, I could even have students write thank you letters to donors who donated more than the average ‘can of dog food’. Writing letters is a fifth grade standard in our personal narratives unit as well as Reformation unit. Students will have to revisit what they have learned about this! My last thought to bring in a little more digital literacy into this project would be to set up a GoFundMe page for people to donate money that we can then give to the shelter. A GoFundMe page requires you to write a summary of what the money is going to and why they should donate.Want to learn more about this project? Come back next week for the activity proposal and budget that we want to put up to our school district. 




References:

Hsu, H., & Wang, S. (2017). RETHINKING LANGUAGE LEARNING. Literacy Today, 35(3), 28-29. https://sunyempire.idm.oclc.org/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Ftrade-journals%2Frethinking-language-learning%2Fdocview%2F1966005990%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D8067




Special Issues, Volume 1: Critical Media Literacy : Bringing Lives to Texts, edited by Tom Liam Lynch, National Council of Teachers of English, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/empire-ebooks/detail.action?docID=7101610.



Created from empire-ebooks on 2025-05-27 00:16:16.