The students and their families have been hard at work on a special social studies project.  After learning about what a culture is and how cultures can be different and the same, we learned that many families in the United States can trace their heritage back to different cultures.  For some families, we don’t need to look that far, and for others, we go back several hundred years before finding ancestors from other parts of the world.  Still more families have Native American heritage.  We learned a little bit about the processes that our ancestors may have gone through to get to the United States, including sailing on ships and passing through Ellis Island.

Then, each student chose a friend or family member to interview about that person’s heritage.  We brainstormed interesting questions to ask, including, “What did your ancestors wear?”, “What was school like?”, and “What jobs did they have?”  After completing the interview, we turned the information we learned into a short script.  We made videos telling about our interview subject and asked them to send pictures for us to use.

Meeting Mr. Vanetti

Today, we took a field trip to the Apple Store!  When we got there, we met… Mr. Vanetti!  He is a “Creative” at the Apple Store.  His job is to help people learn how to use Apple products, and today, we were his students.  Mr. Vanetti gave us special Apple Store field trip T-shirts to wear.  Then, we combined our videos and pictures with music, titles, and maps showing where our interview subjects’ ancestors came from.  It was a lot of work, but it was really fun!

Getting our shirts

Starting on our movies

In the coming weeks, we will have a movie screening where we will get to share the movies we made with our families and each other.  At that point, each student will receive a certificate of completion and a flash drive bracelet containing the movie they made.

We owe a big “thank you!” to all of the friends and parents who supported the process leading up to today, and to those who were able to join us on our field trip and collaborate with our first graders as they created their movies.  Thank you to the Apple Store and Mr. Vanetti as well for helping us make these great projects!