Community Education: Student Empowerment

Assignment 6:  UCLA Students Share Their Stories with Wilton Place Kids

 According to Wilton Place teacher Tony Osumi:  "If UCLA students can create opportunities for the booklet to express the kids' voices and interests, it will be no problem getting them to write for it.  Motivation comes from the meaningfulness of the work.  My guess is that most of the kids have not read or seen stories or heard people talk about their lives in real ways.  They may need models and examples from us.  UCLA students should be writing stories now and sharing them with students.  Students may also not really understand the concept of publishing and sharing their stories with a wide audience.  Most teachers don't do anything like this — not even within their own classroom.  If kids grasp the importance of wanting to share their own stories and receive support for doing it, motivation goes way up.  UCLA students should think of ways to bring this understanding to a kid’s level quickly."

Taking Tony’s comments into account, write two short stories of about one-half page each about yourself based upon the following list or any other topic you think may be relevant to the type of work we are doing in Wilton Place classrooms.  Remember, we are writing this for elementary students.

1.  How you got your name and what it means.
2.  How and why your family came to America or Los Angeles.
3.  Your most memorable day — good, bad, exciting, scary, etc.
4.  Your favorite family food.
5.  A story that connects somehow to the Open Court theme, but takes it a step further and teaches a moral, message, or is more critical and probing.

My Country, Japan!

By Eriko Suzuki

My name is Eriko Suzuki. I am Japanese, and I’m in the 16th grade in a university in Japan. Now I am studying at UCLA for one year. Have you heard “Japan”?  This is my country.  Japan is as large as California, but there are about 123,000,000 people.  The population of the U.S has twice as much as that of Japan, but the land of the U.S is 25 times than that of Japan!!  So Japan is very crowded.  We do not usually speak English.  We speak Japanese.

The U.S, your country, is very important for Japan, although we use different languages.  We exchange many things each other.  For example, Japan buys many oranges from the U.S., and the U.S buys many cars from Japan.  Similarly, American music is very popular in Japan, and Japanese animation is very popular in the U.S. But there are some bad things in Japan.  Japan sometimes does not try to insist in its opinions and follows the U.S.’s opinions.  I think that Japan has to have its own opinions and take an important role as a member of Asian countries. We are related to each other.  Although we have different language and culture, we hope we will exchange good ideas and opinions and be good friends forever!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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