Lesson 2
Interview
a Family Member
Interview
a family member and create a slide presentation that will
contain several things:
1) A
timeline of four significant events that happened
in their
lifetime.
2) A
narrative about their life based on an interview that you are
going to conduct with this person.
3)
Photographs of your family member that you can include in your
presentation.
Interview
Guidelines
1) Decide
on a family member whom you'd like to interview and make sure he
or she knows you are using the interview for a school
presentation.
2) This
is a good time to ask the person for a photograph or pictures of
them to use in your presentation.
3) Try to
come up with the questions based on what you already know about
your family member and what you have learned about the major
historical events during his or her lifetime.
4) When
you formulate questions think about the answer. If the answer is
one word or a phrase, such as yes or no, then reword the
question.
5) When
you are conducting the interview make sure you take notes or
record the interview. This way you can edit it and rewrite the
important parts for your presentation.
6) Type
the interview in a word processing program. When you are ready
to create your timeline (see Lesson 3), you can copy and paste
between the word processing and drawing programs.
What
Was Happening The Year You Were Born?
Have your
students go to
http://ourtimelines.com/
create_tl_2c.html
to find out what happened from the time they were born until the
present. This is an excellent website to help students put in
the dates that their family member was born in order to discuss
if any of the events had an impact on their lives. Allow them to
print out a printable version of the timeline to take home or if
need be print out one for the class and each student can choose
several important events from the timeline. In addition there
are links that will take the student to find more information on
those significant events that appear on the timeline.
A Look
at Some Historical Timelines
Your
students can look at the following historical timelines to see
if their relatives had lived and experienced such events as the
Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement or were
immigrants to this country. This is an excellent way to work
across the curriculum and work with your colleagues on this
project.
Check out
EllisIsland.org and find "A timeline of immigration
history shows the forces that brought people from all over the
world to America's shores."
http://ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island_timeline.asp
This
website will give you a timeline from 1870-2000 of different
events relating to people, events and data:
http://pbs.org/fmc/interact.htm
Civil
Rights Timeline can be found on this website:
http://infoplease.com/spot/civilrightstimeline1.html
The
Vietnam War timeline can be found at:
http://pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/time/
Interviewing
Icebreaker Activity - (2) 45 minute sessions
Students
will pair off and spend 10 minutes writing down questions they
would like to ask their partner. Next, each student will be
responsible for interviewing a partner and with the answers
they will have to write a paragraph to present to the entire
class. Each student will have 2 minutes to talk about their
partner. If time allows you can help the students to create a
rubric to assess the performance of each group presenting their
information.
Interviewing
Techniques
Check out
this website to get tips on how to interview relatives.
http://cjh.org/family/pdf/InterviewingRelatives.pdf
You can
download this and give a copy to your students or have them
refer to it online.
Another
website with interviewing techniques is:
http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/staffdev/
tpss99/processguides/interviewing.html
Interviewing
Questions
This
website will give you 50 family interview questions to get
you started with coming up with your own questions:
http://scrapbookscrapbook.com/
FamilyTree/familytreequestions.html
There are
additional sample interview questions on this website:
http://geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/6658/famhist2.html
A Look
at Narratives Written from Oral Interviews
This
website lists some narratives written by high school students
who wrote after interviewing family members. Have your students
pick one to read to get an ideas about what kinds of questions
they may have asked their family members in order to get the
responses they did.
http://teachersnetwork.org/teachnet-lab/FKLANE?pmaslow/winners.htm
Click
Here to see Sample Student Transcript
Writing
Checklist for Students
Writing
Checklist.pdf This
checklist was created using http://4teachers.org.
You
can create your own
checklist by going to the following URL:
http://pblchecklist.4teachers.org/testing.php3?idunique=3&max=
6&checklist=13
|