We have linked with senior citizens in our local community forming friendships with them and finding out about their early lives. We also taught them to blog. We would love to hear about any projects you have done with your local senior citizens.
This is the story about our Senior Citizens project
Right at the end of last year our school moved to another building in Fish Hoek, right next door to a Home for the Elderly. This gave Mrs Beal the idea of teaching our Grade 4&5 class to blog and then connecting them with senior citizens in our community in an exciting blogging project.
Our project takes shape
We thought that we would like to find out more about senior citizens in our community to find out what life like when they were young. Was school like the schools of today? What was the fashion at that time? Has everything changed a lot? So we brainstormed together and came up with this really good idea on how to get our project started.
We thought we would make a start by inviting the senior citizens to a tea at our school and tell them about our project which would run over at least six weeks. During that time we would find out all about them, publish this information in our blogs and share it with other schools around the world. We wanted to see if retired folk around the world have similar experiences. Oh, and we would offer to teach the grandparents and retired folk to have their own blog if they wanted one, but we would only make that offer later in the project!
Designing our invitations
First of all we designed our own invitations in computer lessons inviting the senior citizens to a tea.
Handing out the invitations
We handed these out to some of the residents of Nerina Gardens Home for the Elderly right next to our school, our Grade 4&5B class’s own grandparents if they lived locally in Fish Hoek, and to other senior citizens in our community. We found that everyone was very friendly towards us.
Baking for the tea
So, we planned our tea for Thursday 26 March 2009. Before the tea the class researched suitable recipes using the internet. Their class teacher wanted to use these for class baking every time the senior citizens came to our school.
The class teacher used these for a baking session in our Domestic Science room where the class baked delicious treats. Yummy! We baked in groups. It was such fun.
Week one – The tea (26 March 2009)
Soon the various senior citizens arrived and we served them tea in the front garden. We introduced ourselves and got to know a little bit about them. Here are just a few photos from the tea.
After tea we took the senior citizens to the computer room. Mrs Beal paired us off and we showed our new friends our blogs. They were amazed. They had never heard of blogs.
Week two – interviewing our senior citizens
The second week of our Senior Citizens’ project was very interesting because this is the week that we asked the Senior Citizens all about their younger days. We had a questionnaire to fill in, and we had to use keywords only so that we could keep eye cotact with the senior citizens when they shared their stories with us. In our next computer lesson we typed out our senior citizens’ experiences. You will find these reports in our individual blogs. We found out so many interesting things about the years before we were born.
Week three – checking our work
This week the senior citizens read through what we had written up from the interview to check that we had listened carefully. They also brought photos and memorabilia to show us. By this time we had made firm friends with our senior citizens and Mrs Beal invited them to learn how to blog! We would help them.
Week four – teaching the senior citizens to blog in their own blogs
This week was great fun. We had asked the senior citizens the previous time who would like to have their own blog and to our delight most of them wanted to learn. They arrived as promised. Mrs Beal had also invited a keen local blogger, Alison, to come and share her enthusiasm for blogging. We were also privileged to have Jayne Martin from the Afritwin project, come along to see what we were doing.
After eating what we had baked, and listening to Alison’s inspiring talk, we sat with our senior citizens to help them if necessary as Mrs Beal, our computer teacher, instructed them.
Week five – time to say goodbye for the holidays
This was the last session of the senior citizens project before the three week July holidays, but we promised to invite our friends back the following term. Unfortunately some of our senior citizens were unable to be there on that day as it was very cold, wet and rainy. Once again we baked a scrumptious tea. The class made little booklets with all the photos of their senior citizen during the project, and we presented these to our senior citizens to keep as a memory of the project.
Here is Ulfdav showing all the different pages of her booklet, which was made from a template:
We looked at each other’s blogs and wrote comments. It was a great time. We knew we wouldn’t see our senior citizens for a while because it was our three-week mid-year holiday. Here is a slideshow of some of the senior citizens looking at their booklets.
To end off the term we took a group photo in the front garden because the sun had decided to show up!.
This project definitely helped us to bond with our senior citizens. Everyone enjoyed it.
Linked to Steenberg Primary School
One of our local formerly disadvantaged schools, Steenberg, really liked the sound of our project and they asked us to help them duplicate it. They also worked with their elderly community and interviewed them. We helped them make blogs. This week, the last week of term, they invited us and their senior citizens to a tea at their school to say thank you! Here are some pictures.
The project continues
This is now an ongoing project. We have had a wonderful experience bonding with our senior citizens. The interesting part is that we have made friends with classes around the world who are either copying our project or we are writing collaborative stories with them. We want to be able to show this to our senior citizens.
Reunion after the holidays
We invited our senior citizens back after the holiday and it was wonderful seeing them again. We showed them our collaborative writing projects and they wrote in their blogs.
Video time
Mrs Beal won an award for this community project and a video team came down from Joburg to video us with our senior citizens. They sent Mrs Beal a couple of clips and she has put them into a video. Here is the video:
Mrs Geel from the USA visits
We were so excited! We had an exciting visitor from the USA during the project – Mrs Geel, who teaches Grade 3 at Dutch Nek School in New Jersey. (Her outgoing class was linked to our class. They interviewed their grandparents after hearing about our project and they wrote comments in our blogs). We had a great time hearing about schools in the USA and how they operate. Mrs Geel brought a lovely children’s book along about President Barak Obama, as a gift from her class to our class. She read portions from it and showed us how Barak Obama’s parents and grandparents stressed the importance of education when he was growing up. Thank you for a wonderful visit, Mrs Geel.
At the end of her visit the class broke into spontaneous song singing a song they had just learned in drama!
Our school musical, Peter Pan
Most of our Grade 4&5 class was in the school musical, Peter Pan, many of them with lead parts. Some of our senior citizens from our Senior Citizens project came to a morning performance. They loved it.
Our Senior Citizens tell the Grade 1s about their blogging experience
The senior citizens came to have tea with us and see what we have done lately on our blogs. The exciting part about this session is that we invited some of the Grade 1s who had never heard of blogging to meet our senior citizens. Our senior citizens then explained to them about blogging and showed them their blogs!
Keeping in contact
We are keeping in contact in the times that we don’t see our senior citizens, by smsing them on our mobile phones in computer lessons or by making cards for them. This has been a very uplifting project both for them and us.
We have a lovely programme called Microsoft Autocollage and we used it to make cards for our senior citizens.
We invited them to come and visit us again and we presented them with the cards.
Finding blogging partners for our senior citizens
We are busy finding blogging partners in other countries for our senior citizens.
Blogging has bonded us with our senior citizens so much.
Just to say: Thank you for inviting me to share with you yesterday -I had such fun and it was great to meet you and your grandparents.
I’ve had a look at some of your blogs and am so impressed with what you are doing!
I hope you are going to enjoy blogging for a long time to come and that some of your grandparents will too.
Hi Mrs. B
This is Mr Millward from Canada again. Thanks for writing back. You are really doing a wonderful job with your students. Boy! it is a far cry from my days at school. Nevertheless, we are charged with expanding their horizons and to make them realize that their classroom has essentially become a global classrooom. I have added your class blog as a link on my class blog as I would like to maintain contact with your class. If possible, I would like to explore joint learning opportunities between our two classes. What do you think?
Hello Mrs. B
This is a student from Mr. Millwards class. Your students did a very good job on their blogs! I love the project your students did how they set up time for the people in the retirement home. I hope they had a very fun time doing their project.
Here is my blog if you would liketo vist it… shyw2009.edublogs.org
Hello Mrs.B’s class
This is a student from Mr.Millwards class in Canada. Your students did a good job on your blog. The pictures were awesome and they were so funny. Please come visit my blog. http://www.kgorm2009.edublogs.org/
This is a student from Mr. Millward’s class in Canada. It is always nice to see fellow students learn more about seniors in their community. What made you guys thinks about doing the senior citizen project?
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April 24th, 2009 at 4:46 am
Just to say: Thank you for inviting me to share with you yesterday -I had such fun and it was great to meet you and your grandparents.
I’ve had a look at some of your blogs and am so impressed with what you are doing!
I hope you are going to enjoy blogging for a long time to come and that some of your grandparents will too.
May 21st, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Hi Mrs. B
This is Mr Millward from Canada again. Thanks for writing back. You are really doing a wonderful job with your students. Boy! it is a far cry from my days at school. Nevertheless, we are charged with expanding their horizons and to make them realize that their classroom has essentially become a global classrooom. I have added your class blog as a link on my class blog as I would like to maintain contact with your class. If possible, I would like to explore joint learning opportunities between our two classes. What do you think?
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Hello Mrs. B
This is a student from Mr. Millwards class. Your students did a very good job on their blogs! I love the project your students did how they set up time for the people in the retirement home. I hope they had a very fun time doing their project.
Here is my blog if you would liketo vist it… shyw2009.edublogs.org
June 8th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
Hello Mrs.B’s class
This is a student from Mr.Millwards class in Canada. Your students did a good job on your blog. The pictures were awesome and they were so funny. Please come visit my blog.
http://www.kgorm2009.edublogs.org/
June 8th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
This is a student from Mr. Millward’s class in Canada. It is always nice to see fellow students learn more about seniors in their community. What made you guys thinks about doing the senior citizen project?