Angela Bodurtha, Kindergarten Teacher
EVCF Grant Recipient Angela Bodurtha Is all smiles. With the funds received from the Eastview Community Foundation grant, she was able to purchase enough CD players and headphones to create six Listening Centers… one for every kindergarten classroom at her school – Diamond Path Elementary. A listening center is the piece of furniture that houses the headphones and CD or cassette player that enables as many as six students to listen to one book at the same time.
Angela had seen Listening Centers at a previous school and knew how valuable they would be to the kindergarteners at Diamond Path. She explained, “Especially in kindergarten, a lot of our literacy is building oral language. So for students to be able to hear books, and hear book language, gets them more prepared to start looking for that book language in the books that they’re reading. They’re also hearing, and that makes them more comfortable with writing it as well.”
After talking to some colleagues at her school and learning about the opportunity for an EVCF grant, she decided to go for it. Bodurtha said “I wrote the grant in hopes that we might get some funding because there was no money in our budget or the school’s budget to be able to do that. Just knowing that it would [make] such an impact because it would be something we use everyday or almost everyday. It’s typically between 8 and 12 students that get to use it.” Before receiving the grant they were only able to help one student per classroom!
Using the Listening Center since September 2015, Angela says the Listening Centers have been very valuable in helping children who have not had much interaction with books to embrace reading. “When you give them a book by itself, it seems very overwhelming because [they may think ‘I don’t know how to read’ or ‘I can’t do this on my own’. But when you put the book in their hands and they know someone is reading it to them, it really elevates their comfort level to … tackle that challenge.”
Angela was able to attend the EVCF Scholarship Award ceremony last May and comments, “When I went to the ceremony last year it was just so exciting to hear all of the people that are benefiting from the Foundation… that’s amazing! We are so fortunate!”
Thank you Eastview Community Foundation!!