Overview:
Each person has a story to tell. Although not everyone's story ends up in your history book, each person's story fits into the history of that time. Each person is affected by what happens and in turn leaves his or her mark upon the world.
The Grandparent (Significant Elder) Project will lead you though and interview with your grandparent or elder, to an understanding of twentieth century history. In the process, you will examine primary sources including photographs, sound recordings, and documents and you will gather information. You will also create a primary source (the transcript of the interview), a secondary source (a webpage).
Directions:
Your webpage will focus on a topic or theme of interest that emerges from the grandparent/elder interview. You will select the topic for your paper and research it in depth. You will write about your grandparent/elder's individual role in history, how that history affected your grandparent, and how your grandparent influenced the history of the twentieth century.
In this project, you will:
Directions for completing activity:
Ask a grandparent, great grandparents, or elder if they will be willing to be interviewed for this project. Tell them you will be asking them questions about their childhood and their memories of an elderly relative they remember as a child. Tell them that you will be recording the interview and will be using portions of it in a published website. You would also like to borrow photographs that could go along with what you will talk to them about. Tell them that you may have to have a second meeting with them as you work on your report. If they agree to this. Tell them that their stories and photographs will be shared with your class and made available to the public through the classroom website. Be sure they agree to this.
You will use the interview questions that your class developed to help you structure your interview. here are some additional interview tips that will be helpful.
Once you have conducted your interview you will uncover a theme or a topic of interest. That will become the focus of your webpage. You will use family photographs, audio recordings, movie clips and newspaper articles to place your elder's story into those time period of American history.
You will have two parts to your feature story: (1) an event or incident about your grandparent/elder and (2) an event or incident about the older person your grandparent/elder remembers.
Each of you will conduct an interview and create a feature story about your grandparent/elder that will be used in the webpage. Here are some helpful tips you will want to consider when you develop your webpage.
You will record your interview on a camcorder or audio-tape. You will collect two or more family photographs that can be borrowed and copied for use in your report. Use this photograph observation form to help you select your photographs.
Once rough drafts of everyone's stories are ready, we will form technology work groups along themes that are determined by the class. The technology work groups will, edit portions of the interviews from the camcorders and audio-tapes, collect supporting materials from the Library of Congress American Memory resources and develop the webpages.
The teacher and the media specialist will be available to help you with the technical "stuff".
Interview Rubic: - scored individually for interview
Website Rubric: - scored individually for website development
Collaborative Work Skills: Rubric - scored individually - used for small group/class discussions
Overall Project Rubic: - scored individually for overall performance during project
Terwilliger Family Memories