Demographics
I teach third grade in Chicago Public Schools. My school is located on the North Side of Chicago and is a PK–8 school with just under 1,100 students. I have a moderately diverse class of 30 third graders who attend a neighborhood school in an area that has been becoming more affluent and less diverse in the past few years. Currently, our school is 43% white, 35% Hispanic, 7% Black, 6% Asian, and 7% Other. About 17% of our students have limited English capabilities and we have an excellent inclusion model for special education students who also represent about 17% of our population.
We recently lost our Title 1 funding because our poverty index dropped below the threshold; our low-income percentage is now 41.2%. However, this seeming affluence sometimes overshadows the reality of our student population. Each year, I have some students who experience homelessness and/or live in poverty and as a result, there is a range of background knowledge in our classroom. We do not have a specific social studies curriculum as we are an IB (International Baccalaureate) school. IB schools focus on student-led inquiry and transdisciplinary units that include deep learning about a topic across all the subjects. At my school, we have teacher-created IB units and we use the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) and NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) for literacy, math, and science. We use the Illinois social science standards to build our units as well.
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