Celebrating - Small & Big Things

      Time again to celebrate with Ruth Ayres for Celebration Saturday! Visit here for all the posts. Like always, thanks Ruth for starting this community!

     Still sharing a little more of our trip to Captiva Island. It was a wonderful week, and I celebrate that my children and their families are able to join me each summer.

Most evenings we found a special restaurant for dinner.
This is everyone but me, after eating, full and happy!

Learning History by Talking

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers. Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  

Wouldn't it be great to have interviewed this woman?

             Sometimes people ask me what are my favorite assignments and I'd like to tell you briefly about one.  As the years pass, older people leave us, and I believe we educators are missing opportunities for students to meet elders to discover their lives when they were young.  Beginning experiences in interviewing help students' confidence, so the very first day, an assignment is to interview a classmate for the class scrapbook.  This scrapbook is a record, a history of this year's class.  There is a group that is in charge of creating the actual book's design, but everyone has a chance to add to it.  By pairing up students for interviews on the first day, they have the opportunity to meet a classmate they might not know so well, a good first step in talking with someone 'almost' new.