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.

Teamwork

By Melissa Hilario       

I like to do teamwork with my brother and my sister by helping our “Nanay” clean the house.  We take turns doing different chores like vacuuming the carpet, washing the dishes, picking up trash on the floor, sweeping the kitchen floor, and dusting.  We take turns cleaning the different rooms in the house like the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room.  We give the rooms code names like Sector 7A, Sector 7B, and Sector 7C.  We pretend we are soldiers and our mission is to keep the different sectors clean.  We pretend we have a time limit for how long we have to clean each room, so we clean as fast as we can.  Every time we clean the house, we write down how many minutes it took us to clean.  Each time, we try to beat our fastest record.  When we are done cleaning, we feel proud of ourselves.  It makes our mom and dad happy when we help them.  If we did not work together, we cannot clean the house as fast. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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