It is so wonderful to see how an every day assignment can affect a student’s life and their understanding of themselves:
Thank you so much for writing about this assignment and your approach to it. I think you are absolutely right about how much writing and talking there is to do in a project that is about discovering who you are and where you come from.
There are so many ways of figuring out “your own context”, but a family tree is one of the easiest ways to contextualize yourself and try to plant roots in a specific time period. The past is so abstract for so many kids, but when they think about their great-grandparent’s generation, they can more easily learn about the history of that time period. While not every child is going to have a well researched family history, like the one from this email, every child does have a rich personal history. Each one is worth exploring, writing about, and talking through with others.
via Walk the Walk: Writing Family History & Culture with Students.
