Again, thank you so much!

I am an elementary school ESL and third grade teacher. I am a member of the Sally Ride Academy and am very actively promoting STEM education and careers to the elementary school students with whom I work.

I am writing to ask for your consideration of a project I have live on http://donorschoose.org/give to obtain an iPad2 for my students. While the primary goal of this project is mathematics, the iPad2 will also directly support science instruction (as well as reading literacy skills, social studies – well pretty much everything!)

I know this is a late request but I just saw this today. Any help that your readers or bloggers could give would be very much appreciated. My school is Title 1 and about 82% of the students receive free or reduced lunch. For many students, using great tools like the iPad2 is dependent on being able to do so at school. I’m not afraid to ask for help in support of their education. I’ve had more than 14 projects funded on Donorschoose and I assure you that students are using these resources on a daily basis!

If you are able to help in any amount please visit my giving page at http://donors noose.org/give

Thank you for your consideration!

Matt Tosiello
Grade 3 and ESOL Teacher
Randolph Elementary School
Arlington, Virginia

You had written on your first blog post about Donors Choose to share a story about science education, so here is mine:

In addition to receiving the creationism and evolution lessons side-by-side, my favorite science class memory is this completely wackadoodle “experiment” we did in high school.

As follows:

Class goes down to the banks of the Mississippi River. (The banks were, like, 200 yards away.)

Class splits into pairs, each pair digs up one yogurt container’s worth of dry dirt.

Pairs count the “organisms” we find in our yogurt container of dirt. (Organism was loosely defined as anything that was alive and wiggling and visible to the naked eye, and most of us found nothing.)

Pairs take yogurt containers of dry dirt and transplant them a few feet closer to the river, dumping them on top of good old Mississippi mud.

Then we each mark our spot with a colored pencil stuck into our own little pile.

A week later we came back and all the colored pencils were gone, but we bravely proceeded, eyeball-estimating our former spots and digging up a yogurt container of mud.

Then, once again, we tried to count organisms. Most of us found nothing.

Then we graphed!

(I donated to science education so that kids can get a better science education than I did.)