Sunday, Oct 21

Sunday was full of family roots. We started class by each reading through the information we've each collected and separating the information into sides of the family and into which paragraph everything would end up.

During our bagel break, we discussed why it is so important for us to learn about our family roots. Of course, everyone had different reasons that were more important to them personally than others, but overall, here is what we came up with:

- We can learn to avoid mistakes our ancestors made
- One day the people who have these stories won't be here anymore and if we don't get there stories, the stories will just die away--like so many of them unfortunately already have
- We can keep family legacies and stories alive. Lucas suggested that this would be like creating a metaphorical statue to remember the history of our families.
- If we learn about history and our personal histories, we can keep things like the Holocaust from happening again
- Joanna suggested that one interesting thing about this project is that we have the opportunity to learn about how our ancestors' lives were when they were teenagers
- We can't really know who we are until we know who our family is (This thought included an interesting Star Wars, Dearth Vader reference)

Ask your child which ideas were most important to them!

After our break, we spent the rest of the time starting to type our Family Roots projects. We should be able to finish them up next week.

Right now, the students should be working on getting their Wisdom of the Guides interviews. If possible, they should get them audio taped so that we can create living history Story Corps-esque projects with them. I will bring in my digital recorder if anyone wants to borrow it, but many cell phones and mp3 players also have sound recorders now. Let me know if this is a problem or issue. In class we discussed that if they are interviewing someone over the phone, they can record from speaker phone.

I hope the week is going well for everyone and we're all finding a little time to enjoy this wonderful weather. See you all Sunday.

Becca

ps- Ask you child to show you his/her presenter's voice. We've been practicing quite a bit in the gym, and they're starting to get good.