Help Equip My Classroom with Essential Writing Curriculum

Hello! My name is Catherine Norwood and I serve K6 students who are English Learners (EL) at a Title I elementary school in Mesa, Arizona.

These amazing scholars represent varied cultures including their native languages. Every day they work diligently and joyfully as they master the English language for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. This is incredibly challenging work for them!

As a dyslexia practitioner, I teach students of all language needs including dyslexia, characteristics of dyslexia, or general reading disabilities or delays. All of my students are learning English as a second or multiple language. No matter what, each of my students deserve a teacher who understands the science of reading and writing, and who is well equipped with curriculum.

I have 30+ years of teaching experience and am certified as a Wilson Dyslexia Practicioner, as well as trained in multiple structured literacy programs. I need your help to fund my purchase of Heggerty Bridge to Writing curriculum that is both research and evidence based!

This curriculum will save me hundreds of instructional planning hours so that I can focus my time on teaching and diagnostically identifying student mastery and areas of need. I serve nearly 200 K6 students so time is especially precious as a resource.

This curriculum covers Arizona ELA/Writing Standards. The scope and sequence is organized to include best practices for daily writing instruction including grammar and different writing genres (e.g. narrative, informational, argument, etc.). It also combines writing instruction with text reading to build students' writing skills along with their reading comprehension and vocabulary skills!

As my students' writing skills increase, so will their reading decoding, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling skills increase. Importantly, this type of integrated skill success increases their learner confidence and motivation to read and write more!

I have been saving money to self fund a portion of this curriculum that is divided into grade level sets: Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 2, and Grade 3. I have advocated for this writing program for school purchase, but the funding is not available so I am seeking outside support.

My goal is to be able to purchase the curriculum to use for the new 2024/2025 school year start .

Please consider supporting my work as a public school teacher. You really do make the difference!

Thank you!