Community Stories, Oral Histories Link Students to History
Community stories are history!
Record interviews. Craft stories. Add poetry, art, music. Students, educators and communities see how THEY are part of the stories that we call "history".
Who in your community has personal stories of important historical events? Are there elders who have dramatic wartime stories? Who had family that moved out West? Who had stories from the Jim Crow era?
It's all about primary sources!
Help students learn history through the eyes of people who have lived it. Find families who share memorabilia from an ancestor. Discover historic buildings like the first African-American owned hotel in Dublin, GA. (A teenage Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed there when he delivered his first public speech in the 1950s!)
Grow literacy skills collecting local history.
Students do research and arrange interviews. Students and teachers learn how to edit and craft stories from interviews. They are published! In the library. As a performance. In a book. In an electronic file. With the community.
An easy way to integrate the arts!
Writing. Conducting oral history interviews. Creating poetry, rap, music. Illustrating the story. Building skills for every student.