Family Ties and Fabric Tales: Elementary Grades

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Part 1: Oral History Presentation and Mapping Exercise
Materials Needed

• Objects gathered from home, including a photo of each student
• World map
• Colored push pins
• Colored markers
• Color coded map key with enough colors for each student (colors correspond to pin colors)
• Literature addressing immigration, slavery and Native Americans
• Copies of the Family Data Sheet

Getting Started

1. Before beginning the lesson, you should address special concerns families with adopted children and those living in foster care may have about the activity. It may be useful to call parents or guardians in advance to discuss the activity and to find out if whether it might raise sensitive issues with their child.

If parents are uncomfortable with the lesson, you can alter the format for the entire class and focus on interesting facts about each student’s immediate family. (In this instance, students still collect family objects, share them with peers, and make a class quilt, but the mapping portion would be omitted as well as any research on ancestors.)

Encourage parents or guardians to talk to their children about their choices in completing the activity. For example, adopted children may want to include both sets of parents, or solely the adoptive parents or the natural parents.

2. Prepare your students for the lesson by reading a variety of short stories that focus on immigration. Be sure to include stories about the First Americans — those indigenous to the land — and about African Americans who were forcibly transported to America as slaves.

The Mats by Fransisco Arcellana (Kane/Miller), The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco (…), Leaving for America by Perry Bresnick (Children’s Book Press), Families by Aylette Jenness (Houghton Mifflin),Encounter by Jane Yolen (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), Two Lands, One Heart by Schmidt and Wood (Walker and Company), Wood-Hoopie Willie by Virginia Kroll (Charlesbridge), Itse Selu: Cherokee Harvest Festival by Daniel Pennington (Charlesbridge), and Grandmother’s Song by Barbara Soros (Barefoot Books) are only a handful of the wonderful resources available.

Look through your own classroom or school library for suitable titles. Discuss the themes and issues presented in the literature. Why do people from all over the world come to America? From where, and by what means? Discuss how the influx of immigrants may affect those who are already here.

A Homework Assignment
1. Give each student a copy of the Family Data Sheet.

2. Review the sheet’s instructions with your class.

3. Provide students with a "due date." One week is probably sufficient time to complete this assignment, and you may want to include the weekend in your time frame to accommodate parents’ workweek schedules.

Classroom Activity
1. Using objects they gathered from home, students either pair up to share their personal histories with each other, or they take turns in front of the whole group. Skills to emphasize are projecting their voices, using inflection, making eye contact and adding feeling to their oral presentation. First demonstrate by sharing your family history with your class community. (See example below.)

2. Each storyteller concludes his or her presentation by locating their countries of ancestry on the map and by marking those nations with color pushpins. All pins should be in countries outside of the United States — except the pins of children with Native American ancestry.

You should make a map key for student identification, which students can fill in as part of the activity. (If you run out of pin colors, you can repeat colors if you make a dot on the second round with a permanent pen to differentiate between students.)

Note: Teachers can wait and have students use their nine-patch quilt blocks when presenting stories. (See Family Quilting Activity)

Example of Oral History Presentation
Beginning with the information from section one of the Family Data Sheet, I hold up a clipping from last year’s calendar on African art and a one-inch piece of a beaded necklace that I found at home. With the students sitting on the rug in front of my chair, I begin:

"Some of my ancestors came from Africa. They were unwilling immigrants taken from a rich land of beauty where dance, art and ornamentation were important parts of life. Many generations later, after slavery ended, my grandmother married a man who came here from Ireland to escape hunger."

At this point I show a newspaper clipping of a potato cut from a grocery store ad before exchanging it for a small piece of pyrite (fools gold) and go on to explain:

"They had my mom, who was born in the golden state of California."

Showing my Italian lire (coin), and a cut-out from a world map of Germany and France, I continue:

"My dad was adopted as a little boy and his birth parents’ ancestors also came from Africa. His adopted parents’ ancestors came from France, Germany, and Italy. He was born in Texas and later became a pilot in the Air Force."

I hold up a small plastic airplane.

  "He got stationed in Japan and that’s where I was born."

Ending with a miniature candy wrapper, a section from a school book club order, and a junk mail offer to join a record club, I say,

"Now I live here in Massachusetts and I love to read and listen to music

when I’m not searching for chocolate."

From a variety of colors, I pick six blue push pins, turn to the world map on the wall, and push a pin into Africa, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan - showing all of the places outside of the United States that my family is from. I write my name next to the color dot on the posted key.

Part 2: Family Quilting
Materials Needed

• Markers
• Copies of the "nine-patch sheet"
• Supply of gathered objects from home (see A Homework Assignment section above)
• Glue sticks
• Scissors
• 9x9 construction paper squares for backing

Classroom Activity
1. Hand out a copy of the "nine-patch sheet" to each child.

2. Ask students to decorate the middle square to provide background for the photograph of themselves. Decorating it before putting the photo down will ensure that they don’t get marker on their picture.

3. The remaining family symbols are organized into the eight remaining squares. (Coloring all of the squares first will be easier than working around items that are glued down.)

4. Some students have traced their ancestry to several countries, and they should write the names of the countries somewhere in the squares with the objects that represent those nations. In one square, students may write the names of two or three countries around a single item.

5. When all of the squares are complete, students may use their nine-patch to tell their story if you did not have them share earlier.

6. Upon completion of quilt blocks, students can glue their pieces onto construction paper backings and then work together to join their individual blocks on a large piece of butcher paper to form one class quilt. Alternatively, they may connect them horizontally along the wall in a banner form.