This week, we’re helping a Dallas kindergarten get all kinds of cool building materials, and an Arkansas first grade to get books they can take home and keep for their very own! We hope that readers who support quality public school education will help by sharing or supporting our featured projects.
The Inoculation Project is an ongoing, volunteer effort to crowdfund science, math, and literacy projects for red-state public schools in low-income neighborhoods. As always, our conduit is DonorsChoose, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that facilitates tax-deductible donations to specific, vetted projects in public schools.
We’ve come a long way on this project for a Dallas kindergarten teacher, and now it’s up here, indicating I think it’s going to be completed this week — maybe later than today, but this week. Mrs. Scales needs lots of STEM building materials so her students can design and build whatever they imagine!
PROJECT #1
Resources: Help me give my students building blocks and resources to help my students create in the learning station.
Economic need: An Equity Focus School; nearly all students from low‑income households. A “Celebrating Black History Month” project.
Location: George W Truett Elementary School, Dallas, Texas
Total: $491.27
Still Needed: $211.27 Completed, thank you! Please consider Project #2 below.
Project description by Mrs. Scales: Students LOVE STEM! I am a kindergarten teacher hoping to add a STEM center to our station rotation. I would also love to have STEM Fridays where all students are able to collaborate together!
STEM can be a great tool for building student thinking and imagination stimulation!
I would love to have many different building blocks, magnetic blocks, bristle blocks, legos, and manipulative options for students to choose from and switch out weekly to keep things new and fun for them!
These STEM building manipulatives can also be used in many different subject areas. So, students will always have a chance to have some hands-on learning!
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
Here are a couple of the items in the request. These “bristle-lock tiles” by PicassoTile are intended for children still developing fine motor skills — it’s a cinch to stick them together!
KASHIAOTE Gears building sets make it easy for kids to build projects that move and do things.
This Arkansas first grade teacher is thinking ahead to how to keep her students from losing ground over the summer, by giving them books of their own to keep.
PROJECT #2
Resources: Help me give my students math workbooks and books to read over the summer break. Thank you for your consideration.
Economic need: An Equity Focus School; nearly all students from low‑income households.
Location: Mabelvale Elementary School, Mabelvale, Arkansas
Total: $373.07
Still Needed: $318.07 $233.07
Project description by Mrs. Kersey: The majority of my students are from low income households. This means that many of them have never had books of their own. Reading is the most important subject, as it is used in every subject and circumstance.
Please help me give my students their own personal libraries at home, as well as a math practice book.
This will help us to overcome the typical summer learning loss.
My goal with this project is to allow students two books and a math workbook take home and keep. This would be one way to promote a love of reading for these students. Thank you for considering my project.
Donations of ANY size can make a BIG difference!
Scholastic is working with DonorsChoose to fulfill this project when it’s funded. They’ve been offering inexpensive paperbound books to children in classrooms since the 1940s — I remember them myself. This video brought back some memories of being a kid with a book.
The contents of the collections Mrs. Kersey’s class will get aren’t enumerated in the project, but I liked this book Scholastic offers, from a book series in which it turns out that dinosaurs who are for some reason the children of human parents 😁 know how to behave!
As I’m sure you remember, our first project from last week was completed when someone swooped in shortly before the diary published! So we can be glad the kids in Oklahoma City will have enough copies of Hidden Figures, but we really can’t take any credit for it.
I myself thank you all, as always, for showing up here and supporting this series! So in place of a teacher note, I’d like to offer this video from the Acappella Science YouTube channel, in which the big Act I closer from Wicked, Defying Gravity, is parodied to allow Newton and Einstein to sing about “Defining Gravity”. Featuring Physics Girl channel’s Dianna Cowern as Newton and Malinda Kathleen Reese of Twisted Translations channel as Einstein. (Reese is a professional singer, but Cowern does pretty darn well for a physicist.)
DonorsChoose has developed the designation Equity Focus Schools to describe some schools that submit projects. They meet two criteria: at least 50% of students are Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, or multiracial, and at least 50% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, the standard measure for school economic need. You can read more at the link about their efforts to address the longstanding inequity in education. |
Founded in 2009, The Inoculation Project combats the anti-science, anti-education push in conservative America by funding science, math, and literacy projects in red-state public school classrooms and libraries. Our conduit is DonorsChoose, a crowdfunding charity founded in 2000 and highly rated by both Charity Navigator and the Better Business Bureau.
Every Sunday, we focus on helping to fund projects in neighborhood public schools where the overwhelming majority of students come from low-income households. We welcome everyone who supports public school education — no money is required!
Finally, here’s our list of successfully funded projects — our series total is 1017! The success-list diary also contains links and additional information about DonorsChoose.