Mrs. W's Room

We started our week with a short clip that I hoped would further express the importance of meaningful conversations. The students also got into groups and wrote a group contract, assigned tasks, and began the process of selecting and scheduling an interview. I was surprised by how quickly most groups scheduled their interviews. There are some students who are definitely ready to hit the ground running with this project. Mr. Mecham visited on Tuesday. From him, we got excellent tips for collecting an oral history. He also shared actual examples from the times he's sat down do collect stories from community members. He brought an expertise that I would have not been able to provide these students. We did a jigsaw reading of The Smithsonian Folklife and Oral History Interviewing Guide, then each group presented on the section they read. Then we did a quickwrite to take some time to reflect on what we had discovered so far in this process. We also tal...

The Legacy Project has launched! The idea for this project started as a wondering last year. As in, I kept wondering if Carey had a museum or a collected history and wondered if the students could have a role in developing and maintaining that history. Last year, Wow Students representatives came and talked to us about their awesomeness (find out more about them  here ). This fall we got the opportunity to take classes on Project Based Learning, so I was able to have some time to develop the idea further, get feedback, and start gathering resources. From there the idea developed into a 12th grade English, oral history project to be presented to community members and displayed on their graduation night--a sort of gift to the community. Then everything started to fall in place. Wow Students put me in contact with Mary Tyson at the Community Library in Ketchum. After meeting with her, I had a much better idea of the scope of the project, and she gave me some great resources and...