2021 Mini Grant Award Winners
Jeannette Alday, Victoria Aqcaoili and Rachelle Bautista:
Jeannette is the Principal for Pioneer Elementary School in New Haven. Both Ms. Bautista and Ms. Agcaoili support the special education population. Ms. Bautista teaches the mild to moderate classroom, grades 2-3, and Ms. Agcaoili teaches a mild to moderate classroom, grades 4-5. Both collaborate weekly to support the needs of the special education program.
They plan to purchase books that can be used as read alouds and literacy tools to develop a child’s understanding of feelings and how to articulate their needs. SDC teachers will use books in literacy lessons on character development, character traits, social stories, as well as embedding lessons on comprehension, decoding, and balance literacy skills.
Kathy Langham with Adam Tam
Kathy is a retired 5th grade teacher and Elementary Principal who taught in New Haven for 22 years. Adam Tan is a Junior at Irvington High School and is working on becoming an Eagle Scout. Adam talked with the principal of their local school, Harvey Green Elementary, and she suggested he build a Little Library and place it on the school campus. Adam is in the process of finding donations to support his project. Our mini-grant will help him reach his goal of providing a Little Library for the community. Anyone can take a book from the library. They can keep the book, return it and get another one and/or donate books to the library. Little Libraries are an excellent way to involve the community in increasing people’s access to books.
Eagle Candidate, Adam Tan Adam working on the Little Library
receiving Mini-Grant Funds
from ACRA President, Kathy Langham
Colleen Sill
Colleen is a 5th grade teacher at Amador Elementary School in the Dublin Unified School District. She has started a “calming corner” in her room that students can access just to take a break and breathe. She wants to add short story books for students to read about feeling and regulating their feelings, especially a section of books on social emotional wellness. She also wants to add books on diversity as well as books whose main character is an underrepresented minority to the classroom library.
Vanessa Leong
Vanessa Leong is also a 5th grade teacher at Amador Elementary in the Dublin Unified School District. She wants to incorporate multicultural, diverse books about equality, equity and emotions into her classroom library. She wants her classroom library to contain appropriate literature that can reach out to students to help them to gain acceptance, understanding of others and themselves in order to foster a safe learning environment. Her requests are for books on a wide variety of reading levels including fiction and nonfiction titles.
We wish all our mini-grant winners the very best in their efforts to promote literacy and the love of reading in their students.
2019 Mini Grant Award Winners
Jeannette Alday:
Jeannette is the Principal for Pioneer Elementary School in New Haven and a past president of ACRA. She intends to use the mini-grant funds to add various Social Emotional books to the classroom libraries. With the support of such books they will be able to deepen students’ understanding of self through character analysis and exploration. Their goal is to deepen student agency and self-awareness, linking that with literacy enriched books.
Lynn DeForest:
Lynn is a veteran teacher at Pioneer School teaching third grade. She plans to purchase Kore Wobble Chairs for students with focusing issues. These chairs help improve posture, help focus, are an energy outlet, and are safe with a lifetime warranty. Several of her students would greatly benefit from the flexibility of movement while working or reading independently using flexible seating.
Colleen Sill:
Colleen is a third grade teacher at Amador Elementary School in Dublin Unified School District. She has been a member of ACRA for three years and will be using the funds to purchase recommended trade books to go along with the units in their recently adopted Benchmark Advance ELA Curriculum. There are also suggested books to help students do inquiry based projects and research on specific topics.
Lauren Miceli:
Lauren is a fourth grade teacher at Alvarado Elementary School in New Haven Unified School District. She has been teaching for seven year and plans to use the Smithsonian Magazine list of recent best children books to update her classroom library. She wants to add both fiction and non-fiction books that should appeal to the interests of her students.We wish all our mini-grant winners the very best in their efforts to promote literacy and the love of reading in their students.
2018 Mini Grant Winners
Shea Gregory:
Shea is a teacher at Treeview Elementary School in the Hayward Unified School District. She meets once a week with 1st and 2nd grade African-American girls. She uses interactive read-aloud as a springboard for discussions on culture, identity, and young womanhood. Through these discussions they build care for one another and grow in confidence and pride in what it means to be a Black girl growing up in America today.
She wants to expose the girls to all types of literature, but her main focus is text by authors of color with characters who look like the children’s faces before her. She wants the girls to get used to seeing themselves in text and to feel good about that. ...and to know that they can write stories about their lives and experiences - that their lives matter and have value.
Shea started the group last year when she saw the girls expressing internalized anti-black bias. The interactive read-aloud is the base, and students expand their ideas through writing and art as a means of exploring identity and self-expression.
Click Here to see photos of Shea’s project.
Rodana Breen:
Rodana is the Science Teacher at Pioneer Elementary School in New Haven. She intends to use the mini-grant funds to add various STEAM KIDS books to their science library.
She also hopes to be a to purchase STEM kits such as Engino Discovering STEM Newton's Laws Inertia, Momentum, Kinetic & Potential Energy Construction Kit; Crayola Color Chemistry Set for Kids, Steam/Stem Activities; and K’NEX E STEM Explorations: Swing Ride Building Set.
LaTisha Metters
LaTisha is a kindergarten teacher at Pioneer Elementary School in New Haven.
She has been trying for a while to be able to purchase a Magic Reading Carpet for her kindergarten classroom. The ACRA mini-grant allows her to complete payment and actually own the carpet.
Bee Medders:
Bee Medders is a first grade teacher at Pioneer Elementary School. She plans to use the mini-grant to purchase materials for the classroom Art and Science Area to promote active learning. Students have been using the liquid hand soap, paint, markers, water, and empty water bottles to do "experiments". They sure are resourceful! She also plans to purchase earbuds for the computer. It gets quite loud with the Chromebooks going all at once during small group/learning time.