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Kinship Project Brings Eighth Grade Families Together to Share Stories
The eighth annual Kinship Project Evening took place last night, April 5, the culmination of a six-week 8th grade research and writing project that engages students in interviewing their parents and other relatives; gleaning details of family history and recording stories; and then producing a final paper that includes the interviews and a family album. For this annual story-telling evening, all students, parents, grandparents, and alumni are invited to get up and tell a three-minute story from their lives. Each year the stories range emotionally from the hilarious or anecdotal to the tragic or inspirational. There were belly laughs and—yes—a few tears.
The research/writing project is the joint creation—now 12 years old—of language arts teachers Jennifer Baumer and David Jefferies. "Kinship evening is a natural culmination to our kinship project,” Mr. Jefferies commented. “Students have talked to relatives, then written poems, interview notes, vignettes, and finally a family history prominently featuring the stories their families tell about themselves. So here at the end, we meet as a community and share some of them, inviting students, faculty, and parents to share a cherished story from the family's history." Both teachers contributed personal anecdotes to the evening’s program, along with Dr. Sivan Tarle (director of middle school), and many eighth graders and their parents. The two teachers initiated the invitational story-telling event four years after establishing the writing project, convinced that the powerful student contributions deserved a greater audience and that parents would enjoy the chance to rebut or embellish the anecdotes proffered by their sons and daughters. It was surely a warm evening for all who attended. MORE PHOTOS
