Spend your Cyber Monday savings on teachers this year
A store advertises steep discounts along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. One option for those Black Friday savings is to donate to educators for school projects.
Teachers often spend hundreds of dollars on basic classroom supplies for their students, or on special projects that their schools can’t fund. Some turn to DonorsChoose.org, a crowd-funding website for educators, to raise that money.
After Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping this year, here are some of the projects teachers in Los Angeles need funded, in case you need a way to spend those savings.
A teacher at Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School aims to raise about $1,000 so her students can create silk screens. From her project description:
“While working in this style they will learn about postmodernist artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein that popularized screen printing. They will also be able to use this technique later on in life to create artworks outside of the classroom, and potentially a career using this process.”
It’s easy to overlook costs such as printer ink when planning a storytelling project with students. A third-grade teacher at a South Gate elementary school wants to display her students’ writing around the classroom, but needs about $250 worth of ink to print it all.
3. Spanish-language books
This teacher educates an almost entirely Latino population and wants to build up a classroom library of Spanish-language books that elementary school students can take home to their families. The project costs about $340.
This is for a fourth-grade project to build environments for goldfish, as part of a magnet program in Bell. From the description for the project, which will cost about $300:
“These materials will allow my students to explore Environmental Science as scientists. They will put together goldfish aquariums to learn about organisms and their environments. They will conduct experiments, make objective observations, and learn the importance of respecting living things.”
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5. Computers
Lots of teachers on DonorsChoose.org ask for laptop or tablets so their students can complete class projects or access materials, from kindergarten through high school. One project for the high school Advanced Placement biology students at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies asks for a Macbook Pro so students can make video lab reports.
Reach Sonali Kohli on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli or by email at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com.
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