Anica Brown

Teacher Applicant: Anica Brown
Project Title: Handwriting Across Generations
School: Pound Middle School
Grade: 6

Project Description:
 The idea of letter writing to improve grammar skills, and sharing each other’s experiences, was created because of my interest in a project sponsored by the Lincoln Arts Council called “Stories of Home.” The Lincoln Arts Council project paired a family with an artist, who would listen to their stories and then create a sculpture representing the family.

 In a similar fashion, I decided to pair off my students with a retired resident in our community. The paired students and residents would share their stories of home and school by writing friendly letters to each other. The culminating project had students identify attributes, words of wisdom, favorite ideas or items of their resident by creating an artistic symbol representing them.

 Handwritten letters used to be the way that stories were shared and kept. Now, with email, internet, and text messaging, keeping letters as a way to record history and stories is almost gone. In Handwriting Across Generations, students:

• Demonstrated the friendly letter format in handwritten letters to an older adult
• Compared and contrasted the experiences and history of older adults to themselves
• Reinforced the grammar skills they use on a daily basis

To begin this project, I contacted activity directors from retirement facilities close to our school. The directors of the facilities asked residents to volunteer to become pen pals. We involved sixty-eight residents from the community in this project with the seventy-six students on our sixth grade team.

Parents were notified and asked to sign a letter about our project so their student could participate. Students began writing letters to their pen pals the end of September 2006 through March 2007. Each pen pal letter was handwritten in a spiral journal.

During class, students learned the friendly letter format. We also created lists of their interests, and favorite things, which generated ideas for writing to their pen pals. Each student wrote a rough draft of their friendly letter, and learned revising and editing techniques. Each time a new letter was written, students used peer and teacher conferences to bring their rough draft to its final copy in their pen pal journal. Student pictures were included, along with a biographical poem about themselves which added more personal details.

With every delivery that I made to the retirement facilities, a letter was included to the resident indicating a date to have the journals ready to be picked up. Each resident wrote back in the same journal. Ongoing communication between the activity directors and myself, noted in the Communications section, was essential in continuing this delivery and pick up process.

Extended activities resulted from these relationships. Residents gave out their phone numbers and parents would call and make arrangements for their pen pals to meet. There were holiday open houses where students were invited to attend. Some residents made van trips to school to meet their student pen pals.

In the Activities section of this notebook, special events are listed. In January, through the Lincoln Arts Council, we displayed one of the “Stories of Home” sculptures in our media center. The sculpture, “Du’a,” depicted the journey of Zainab Al-Baaj and her family as they fled Iraq. Zainab and Kate Brooke, the artist, shared a presentation with our sixth grade students on how the story and sculpture were created together.

In February, local artist, Liz Shea, visited our classroom and taught a lesson about using art as symbols. She helped each student create a piece of art representing their relationship to, and/or the history of, their pen pal.
Technology was incorporated in many ways through this letter writing project. In the Program section of this notebook, is a list of cable network videos we watched that assisted students in understanding the time period in which their resident lived and how history affected them. We viewed current scientific videos on experiments that may lengthen our lives. We viewed daily online videos and dispatches with the Blue Zones Quest Legacy Project, an interactive internet program, and used their lesson suggestions to interview seniors about their longevity. Students created PowerPoint presentations comparing and contrasting stories of home and school that they shared between each other throughout this project.
On April l17 and 18, 2007, we will conclude this project with a gallery display in our media center for the public to view. Students will share their art, pictures, handwritten letters, reflective thoughts, and PowerPoint presentations. A personal invitation has already been extended to their pen pals to attend.

Handwriting Across Generations began as a way for students to learn and reinforce letter writing and grammar skills. Our sixth grade students and residents have become friends through this process, building a compassionate relationship for one another through their shared stories of home and school.