Well, this wasn’t just “my” project, but I had a hand in it, and I feel good about both the planning process and the execution of the unit. I am quite proud that I worked outside my comfort zone in many areas this year, but this particular project was both the most challenging and the most satisfying intellectually.
I worked with the stidkid’s 6th grade Language Arts teacher to pull together a writing unit based on sense of place. We tried to work on both the creative side (how you express a sense of place and have it be both personal and comprehensible) as well as the “conversational” side (working with partners, we asked the children to describe a place they have lived, to take notes as their partner spoke, to reflect back how the writing made them feel). We worked on both free-form writing and the process of personal revision and editing other peoples’ work (I volunteered a section of my writing from the NaNoWriMo project last year as their guinea pig). We talked about how oral histories are taken down — as part of a conversation of a person’s history, often grounded in place as well as in time. We compared oral history to other oral traditions (myth, poetry, legend) that are passed down, and how those also convey a sense of the way people see and interact with their environments.
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