CHARLOTTE, N.C. — This April, WCNC Charlotte in partnership with the TEGNA Foundation is handing out grants to several teachers within the Hickory Public Schools Education Foundation.
During this pandemic teachers have worked extra hours to make sure students continue to learn, sometimes using their own money to make sure needs are met.
At Longview Elementary, Spanish teacher Daniel Ernenwein is receiving a grant so he can purchase books for his bilingual class so kids can go home and exchange English to Spanish with their parents.
Mr. Ernenwein teaches Dual Language Immersion (DLI).
“To be able to get bilingual books my students are learning in English and Spanish and I want them to be able to check out the books and bring them home so they can read with their parents in English and in Spanish,” Ernenwein said.
At Oakwood Elementary, teachers Laura Marvin and Dorothy Dalton team-teach the 5th-grade students.
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Their grant will go towards their Innovative & Inquiry-Based Learning with Vernier.
Their program would engage all students and enhance the learning of the following essential science standards for the 5th grade:
- Explain how factors such as gravity, friction, and change in mass affect the motion of objects.
- Infer the motion of objects in terms of how far they travel in a certain amount of time and the direction in which they travel.
- Illustrate the motion of an object using a graph to show a change in position over a period of time.
- Predict the effect of a given force or a change in mass on the motion of an object.
“This money will go for hands-on science that will healthy students actually touch, feel, manipulate the curriculum,” Marvin said.
“And also the weather unit that’s not tangible at all and the products that we are getting with the grant are going to allow us to see on a graph what is the humidity,” Dalton added.
At Jenkins Elementary, Kecia Hopper will be able to purchase the book "Encouraging Strength through Diversity.”
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These books support the direct correlation between diverse literature and academic skills for minority students.
“I am over the moon excited because I already have a list and I can spend it in an hour. I have books that we want, I have books that we’ve been waiting on, we have books that we’ve been looking for we have books on order that we’ve been trying to find to bring to our library that reflect the diversity and the student population here,” Hopper said.
Contact Ruby Durham at rdurham@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
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