Making Connections between Schools, Parents, and Students

Teachers are often challenged to make connections between schools, parents, and students.  Many times parents regard their children and school work as unrelated to the "real world" of their day-to-day lives.  The Library of Congress of the United States of America has suggested that students capture oral histories of their families.

Last year I had two projects that I introduced at the middle school (seventh and eighth grade) level that could be adapted up and down and is relevant to adults as well.  These two projects were a Family Migration History project and a Footprints Project.  You can find out more about these projects on my digital portfolio for education on YouTube.  (Follow this link for the same video on Teacher Tube.)  You can find the details for the projects on these websites:  http://drmontgomery.wikispaces.com/ and http://drm-ms-resources.wikispaces.com/.

In the Family Migration Story we used the National Geographic Human Genome Project as our starting place for everyone's stories, then picked up personal family stories as far back as the parents could remember, talking about family members and reasons for moving from one place to another across the globe.  Using a collaborative writing technique guided by the teacher students in each class created a series of questions which they translated from English to their native language.  They asked their parents the questions and recorded the answers.  They also gathered family pictures, souvenirs, and other family treasures to support their stories.  (These are called primary source documents in historical research circles.)  We made digital copies of these treasures and returned them immediately to their parents.  Our goal was to have the students write a script from their answers and to digitally record their Family Migration Stories--accompanied by the digital photographs of their family treasures.  Ideally they would make the recording in both English and in their native language.  Our goal was to record their scripts onto DVDs which the parents could then play at home.  Due to technological difficulties the audio in our recordings didn't work last year, though the rest of the project went well.

The Footprints project takes the end of the Family Migration Story and talks about what someone has done with their lives.  Middle school students can talk about what they want to do with their lives and what kind of footprint they want to leave on the planet.  Parents and teachers can talk about footprint stories from the point of view of what they have done with their lives and of the footprint they are leaving on the planet.

These are very engaging projects and are good for the beginning of a school year, though they could be a focus point for anytime during the year.  Parents could come to the school to view multiple Family Migration Stories as part of a celebration of learning.

The key to integrating parents into the school life and the life of the students is to make the connections with the real world.  Parents and students studying language together can be a help as well as parents becoming involved as subject matter experts about their own families.