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Jennifer Halverson

My school is a Title 1 school where 100% of the students receive free and reduced lunch. This means that the families of my students have very little resources to spend on school supplies, books, field trips and school fund raisers. Most of my fourth graders do not bring supplies on the first day of school, and it is up to me and the school to find the money to supply them with all they will need through out the year. In part, your donations would be used to supply our classroom with basic necessities such as pencils, pens, markers, paper, and calculators. Reading is extremely important and in order to make the necessary gains each year students must read at home nightly. However many of my students have only a handful of books which they have now outgrown. In order to supplement what we study in class with at home reading I would love to subscribe to National Geographic Kids which provides monthly magazines with interesting, grade level science articles and activities. A subscription for my class for a year costs $125. Another resource that I could us in class and send home for curriculum expansion is Oregon Studies weekly, which provides weekly newspapers with standards based Social Studies articles. A year long subscription for my class costs $177.87. Something that I would like to have more of in my classroom is hands on science experiments and demonstrations. In order for my students to fully grasp the science concepts that we study they need to be able to see them first hand. Scientific studies also encourage my students to think creatively, analytically and collaborate with their peers. I would use donations to purchase science kits that can be reused in following years with minimal consumables that I would need to purchase every year. Thank you for considering to support our classroom, and encourage my students to live a life beyond what they see everyday.