Wrenshall News: Classrooms benefit from nonprofit help

A reader in Cloquet sent a lovely email about the amazing teachers at Wrenshall school. She is an avid supporter of the nonprofit DonorsChoose (donorschoose.org), which makes it easy for people to help classrooms, teachers and students get the tools and experience they need for a great education. The reader explained, “Teachers submit their projects and the charity arranges delivery after the project is fully funded. I ended up being absolutely obsessed with this charity. Since then, I receive an email every month with suggestions, and I have more fun choosing what project to donate to, and I just want to say that many of the ones I have found have been from teachers in the Wrenshall school district.”

There are 10 teachers from Wrenshall utilizing this source to fund learning initiatives. Almost 1,000 donors have sponsored projects, with more than $43,000 raised for our region’s kids.

Niki Rowland has been teaching second grade at the school for more than eight years. She has used DonorsChoose to fund 56 projects over the last seven years, from clocks to help students learn how to tell time and build math skills, to whiteboards for flexible teaching, to durable book shelving, to the books themselves.

Rowland talked about the books she has been able to provide: “‘Ira Sleeps Over’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ were perfect texts to help my second-graders practice making connections: to our own lives, to other books, and to the world around us. We’ve also learned about visualizing, which is creating mental images as we read. ‘Arizona’ and ‘Owl Moon’ were wonderful for these lessons. My students love to close their eyes and describe the ‘movie’ playing in their heads. We also practice digging deeper into our stories and discussing them with each other. ‘Oliver Button Is a Sissy’ is about a little boy who is picked on for being different. There is always a lot to discuss when we read this story.”

The students in Rowland’s second-grade class are part of the whole process.

“I show them on the whiteboard what we are asking for and the progress towards our goals,” she said. “They get so excited when there is an anonymous donor, and when the supplies come there is just pure joy on the kids’ faces — it’s like they are pulling gold out of the packages.”

The students also hand-write “thank you” notes to every donor after a project is funded.

“That’s what is pretty cool — a lot of the funds come from our parents and community, but half of the support comes from total strangers who just care about education and want to make a real direct difference on a local level,” Rowland added.

Deborah Fenlason teaches a grade 5/6 split and she is proposing a project to provide every student with laminated maps as they learn U.S. history. “When we learn about Paul Revere’s ride, we can take our markers and draw the route, and then erase for the next goal. When we learn about what led to the Civil War, we can mark the Union, the Confederacy, and the border states.”

Theresa Vermeersch loves that sites such as DonorsChoose allow her to offer the same opportunities to her students that larger schools can provide. She has focused her recent projects on upgrading her classroom seating options to include flex-space wobble chairs and floor seats and Neo rocking chairs.

“It has made such a difference in my classroom,” Vermeersch said. “I have many students that need to wiggle and move during the day, whether it is during lessons or work time … I have seen that it has helped them focus on what I am teaching versus them having to squirm around on the carpet.”

The email ended with “Wrenshall residents should be proud of their hardworking and dedicated teachers.”

You bet we are. Thank you, Wrenshall teachers.

If you have a Wrenshall-related story, let me know! 218-310-4703 or [email protected]

P.S. The Wrenshall student council is hosting a food drive to help fill the shelves of our area food banks. Students and families are encouraged to donate any nonperishable food items. Donations can be sent with students or dropped off at the main office of the school. The students of Wrenshall are “competing” with Carlton High School to see who can collect the most food items.