Welcome to Our Families Podcasts!

As a focus for our community studies unit in social studies this winter, the students in Laura’s 1^st/2^nd grade class conducted family interviews. This unit is based on the Classroom Interviews curriculum published by Paula Rogovin. We interviewed one person from each child’s family as a means of doing research. Every family in our class was represented in this study. Our interviewees shared stories about family members, childhoods, and family heritage and traditions.

Interviews are a powerful tool for children to engage in research and inquiry. Interviews have to potential to open our eyes to different people’s experiences and points-of-view, different places in our world, and new and exciting ideas. Building upon the skills we used in our previous unit (School Jobs), the children worked on listening skills and honing their questioning skills.

After each interview, two children acted as Reporters. Their job was to report about what they learned from the interview. This provided children the opportunity to show their learning in a different format (rather than just writing about it). The recorded interviews and reporters’ reports were then edited together to make Our Families podcasts! Here are the steps of this work we discussed as a class:

 Step #1: Do the interview. Ask interesting questions. Get juicy answers. Find out about people’s lives and get to know each other’s families.

Step #2: Reporters talk about what they learned.

Step #3: The editor turns the recordings into a PODCAST!

Step #4: People will listen to the podcast and they will learn about our families too!

As New York State is adapting the Common Core Learning Standards this year, the citywide Literacy Focus for Pre-K to 2nd grade is “Written response to informational texts through group activities and with prompting and support” (Reading Informational Text Standards 1 and 10; Writing Standard 2). The children worked on this standard by taking notes during the interviews. They learned how note-taking, or short-hand, can help us remember important or interesting information. The children then used their research notes to inform their oral reports (when they acted as the reporters) and written reports.  The children worked in small groups to produce books about the people we interviewed.

We believe that families are an important source of information about so many things and we value their participation and the knowledge they have to share with all of us. Thank you for your contribution to this curriculum!

Best,

Laura