Speaking up with Confidence

Centennial Middle School

Montrose, CO

Amount Requested: $900

Donation Amount: $300

I am requesting funds PEEQ Qball & speaker system for our 6th grade classes. It is a catchable ball with a microphone, which encourages participation and risk-taking.

During the pandemic, students were forced to learn from home, via computers and laptops. They became used to not speaking up, disengaging, and losing confidence in learning and speaking up in whole class settings. Now that we are back to whole class settings, they are having to relearn how to engage in a live classroom, how to take turns speaking because there is no mute button, and how to actually listen to each other, and speak up when they have a thought to share. They also are relearning that all of their thoughts and questions are valuable, and need to be asked and heard. The PEEQ Qball encourages the students to engage, listen, and be heard, gaining confidence in a supported and positive environment. The PEEQ Q ball is a soft, padded ball that contains a microphone. This microphone is connected via Bluetooth to a speaker system. The students toss the microphone cube to each other and speak into it. This is an exciting way to get students to speak up in class, hear each other better, and participate. It creates excitement to participate as speaking and tossing are both fun activities at any age. We have many quiet students, and our HVAC system is noisy. The combination leads to many students not wanting to participate because it gets frustrating to speak up and be heard. Also, every year we have several students who are hard of hearing. This limits their ability to fully participate in whole class discussions, as they do not always hear the other student's answers throughout the discussion, causing the hard-of-hearing students to retract into themselves and not fully enjoy, participate, or learn to their full potential in class. At least once a month, we gather our home-room students together from several classes, or as an entire grade level to do larger-setting social-emotional learning activities and lessons. This would ensure that all who use the PEEQ Qball can be heard well in not only a classroom, but in a small gym, and we are not limited to just my classroom.