As we launched our history project, the children dedicated themselves to exploring one or two family members to investigate deeply through interview and storytelling. While this proved to be a meaningful way for the children to connect with a person in their family and to gain some historical context of that person’s  life, we stepped back to reflect upon our third grade history question: “Who are my PEOPLE ?”

The question itself implies a plurality of experiences. With this in mind, we encouraged the children to visually represent a broader understanding of the relationships and connections within their family through the creation of a family “tree.” We did not require that it take on the literal shape of a tree, though most students chose this as a symbolic form of representation. The work of creating and revising a family tree served as a way for students to become engaged with their family story and our essential history question. Using information from their initial family research, the children began their first attempts to create their family trees. Each revision demonstrated a perseverance and commitment to uncover more of their family story and a deepening understanding of the vast and interconnected relationships that comprise “their people.”

The children were given pencil and paper to work with and were asked to simply draw the relationships and connections within their family, with no requirement of what it should look like or how far back it should go. Some set out quickly to work, filling up their page, engaged by the challenge of how much they could include and how they could represent the unknown, while others started off a bit unsure and frustrated by the the vast exponential nature of it all and the gaps that felt impossible to know.  

Many recurring curiosities and creative solutions began to pop up in the process. In order to share their thinking, we set up a gallery walk in which the students observed each other’s first attempts. After doing this, they came back to circle and discussed as a group what they noticed in each other’s work.

They built a vocabulary together to show various strategies for representing divorce, death, stepfamilies, and unknown information through different symbols, keys, and lines. Their revisions show an evolution of their thought processes and gained understandings over time.

After the gallery walk and subsequent discussion, there was a palpable energy in the classroom inspired by each other and the new ideas they had co-constructed in the process. With this building excitement about their family tree work, we extended our project time to allow them to immediately revisit their thinking. In this second attempt at representing their family connections, we asked them to use a thinking pen and single piece of paper. As a result, the first minutes were quietly pensive, each student taking the time to think through their plan and decide how they were going to approach some of the elements we discussed as a group:

While the children were all growing in their thinking with each revision of their family tree, some were frustrated by the limitations of working with pencils, pens, and paper as it made rearranging their ideas more cumbersome when  they found out new information. In order to allow the children to more freely and continuously reorganize their family connections, we offered a new form of representation with loose parts.      

With materials such as pom poms, bottle caps, connector cubes and sticks, straws, and buttons, the children were asked to once again represent the connections and relationships within their family tree,but this time they were given a more flexible and fluid template with which to work. As they revised their thinking, they could merely move a part or pick a new symbol of representation. At the completion of their loose parts family trees, each student created a key that explained what each material represented. Then they participated in a gallery work to examine each other’s final products.

Sabine’s Loose Parts Family Tree

Carlin’s Loose Parts Family Tree

Isabelle’s Loose Parts Family Tree

The children have now moved on from constructing family trees to creating a collective and co-constructed timeline, as well as a personal timeline for the relative they have chosen to focus on as a lens for understanding their people in the broader context of history. In the process of determining how they want to represent the culmination of all their project thinking and investigations, the students have spent time researching what life was like in the time of their chosen relative. Gaining a fuller picture of the past, they are beginning to have a clearer picture of how they would like to represent their understanding of “their people” in history. In placing their family story into connection with history as a whole – and with the family stories of their peers- they are driving their own questions for future research and a broader definition and understanding of “their people.” 

The post Finding Our Roots: Exploring “Our People” Through Family Trees appeared first on Sabot at Stony Point.