To help her students commemorate their school experience, fourth-grade Gonzales Elementary School English language arts teacher Xin Jin is helping them create personal yearbooks.
She was awarded a $4,377 grant from Education Foundation grant titled “Collecting Paw Prints.” Gonzales’ school mascot is the Bulldogs.
The grant will impact about 79 students.
The books should be ready by the end of the year.
This was the first time Xin had written a grant. She said she “screamed” when she found out. She was at home about to go shopping when she got the message. She thought she wouldn’t get it because the competition was so strong and English is not her first language.
“I wrote it kind of at the last minute, so I didn’t think I was going to get one. I was very happy. I know that I’m passionate, but I just don’t know whether I wrote (well) enough for the grant,” Xin said.
Every month, her students write about the important things happening in their lives.
“If there is any big test, students write about it,” Jin said.
She takes photos of any class activities.
“… Eventually when we assemble the book, I’m going to share the pictures and then they’re going to type their writings to the book. In the beginning, I had them write on notebook paper on their writing scrapbook. But some students lost their scrapbook, so now I’m using Google Slides for them to write. Anytime there is something important like when we had Red Ribbon Week, I had students write about that. Last Friday, we had a Nimitz choir performance. They wrote about that. And yesterday we had a music program where they sent to their parents Christmas songs and I took picture they wrote about that,” Xin said.
The books will be online and students will use Book Creator. Part of the exercise is editing and revising, which is part of the STAAR test.
“Now that they’ve written a lot, once I get the Book Creator, we’re going to start editing and revising their work, so that they can get better writing skills and they can have something (as a) keepsake,” Xin said.
They are also using IXL, a software that covers language arts skills. It covers reading foundations, writing skills, reading skills and grammar.
This will be Xin’s fifth year with ECISD. She was at Travis for a year.
Previously, she taught English to mainly middle and high school students in China who wanted to study abroad. She started learning English at age 13 as it was mandatory.
Xin said she would recommend that other teachers to apply for grants because they can be very beneficial.
“It didn’t take much time for me to write, but I thought about it very often … for over two months. I thought about it every night when I couldn’t sleep, or sometimes when I’m walking just generate ideas and jot them down. When I had those ideas when I finally started writing, it was not that hard,” Xin said.
She kept thinking about what she could add and how she could refine it.
Once she got it out, it was a relief.
