Ms. Wand’s Fifth Grade: Language Arts Intergenerational Story Project
This project uses Design Thinking in Language Arts.
The goals of the project are for students to:
Listen to someone in your life share a story you haven’t heard before.
Connect with someone two generations above you.
Represent this story in a creative and truthful way through a project.
As part of the Understand phase, the students prepare and practice interview questions geared for the adult of their choice. They record the interview.
They learn about Multiple Intelligences and have to identify one that the adult they interviewed portrayed. Then they incorporate that intelligence into their project’s design.
Ms. Wand wrote about the project: “The idea is that they’ll be inspired by a story from the interview, then think about how they want to represent the story, while incorporating one of the intelligences. For example, if my grandpa talked a lot about how music played a big role in his childhood, I might choose the “musical intelligence” and write a song about childhood and use some of his memories as inspiration for the lyrics. If my neighbor talked about finding God as a teenager, I might create a project using “existential intelligence” that has the viewer consider questions about life and death through some medium.”
After the interviewing the adult (over Thanksgiving weekend), students are given this planning document template to complete for their project and we use this document as a first prototype. (See example.) They get feedback from their teachers from this planning document, make adjustments, then start construction on their project.
They spend four days of class time working on their project. Two days were in the eurekaLab and two days were in their Language Arts classroom, using materials from the eurekaLab.
Who do they get feedback from? Do they circle back to the adult to share what they made?
