Grant Applicant: Freedom Elementary School

The feature below is brought to you by Freedom Elementary School, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here.

To learn more about Freedom Elementary School, please visit their website: here.

Reading Together at Freedom School

We see beauty every day in the faces of our students and their families at Freedom School! Watching our students learn and grow is a great source of pride for our staff and our families. Freedom Elementary School in Freedom, CA is a K-5 public school with 652 students. 95% of our students are Latino and 64% are classified as English Language learners. 91% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Our staff, students and their families are our greatest strength. The students know that they are valued and are active participants in their learning. To help students succeed, we need to have families involved in the culture of literacy.

In general the younger students are asked to read with a family member for 15-20 minutes per night. Reading with a family member can encourage a love of reading and increases reading frequency. Most of our families do not have many books at home, so the teachers send home books for the children to borrow.

Getting appropriate books to students and their families is a crucial step in promoting literacy. To this end, we have installed a little free library in front of our school to provide free access to books for our students even when the school is closed. Letting the students choose the books they take also helps to cultivate a joy of reading. It is truly a beautiful sight to see children rushing to the little library to get new books!

While the library has been a huge success, we lack books that reflect our students’ primary language (Spanish) and have culturally appropriate characters. High quality Spanish books are expensive and difficult to find. We want to provide more high quality books in Spanish so that students can develop their primary language and be able to see themselves reflected in the books they read.

There is a saying that those who know two languages are doubly valuable and that is truly beautiful!

To promote early oral language and literacy development, we are also starting a family literacy project called Freedom Families Read Together. The students will learn how to read books aloud with their younger siblings and help them develop vocabulary and comprehension.

Each week the students in the program will take home a bag of books in their primary language and read them with their younger siblings or other family members. Our families are our first teachers, and this will allow the school aged students to share what they have already learned with their younger relatives.

This family reading project will help the students to build their own fluency and confidence and promote oral language development in their younger siblings which is a critical foundation for literacy. Giving students a chance to share stories in their primary language helps them to see themselves as readers and writers. Representation matters to students and we want to celebrate our community’s culture in our school.

We have just begun the process to become a dual language school which has been shown to be beneficial academically and culturally. We are optimistic that by embracing our students’ primary language we can help develop a truly bilingual and biliterate school culture. There is a saying that those who know two languages are doubly valuable and that is truly beautiful!

Written by:

Julie Hitchcock