The Stories Begin to Pour Out

April 19, 2018

The residents were ready and eager to continue sharing their life stories with my students when we showed up for our second visit today. It was simply amazing to see the life in their eyes when they were asked questions about their school years and young adulthood. At one point, as I wandered from group to group to hear bits of the interviews, one resident looked up at me and said, "This is like exercising my brain! It's amazing what memories start to come back to me when the girls are asking me all these questions!"

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Whose Stories Should Be Told?

March 22, 2018 Who is important? Whose story should be written? How might writing someone's life story be an act of service? These are a few of the questions that we began to consider together, as we begin to prepare to write the stories of the elderly in our community this spring. Today, at the beginning of our Composition class, we spent a few minutes at the whiteboard, writing down the things that society believes about the elderly. Words like "weak", "useless", "boring", and "no longer beautiful' were painfully accurate descriptions of what they have heard and read. When we'd made our list of what society believes, students closed their eyes and listened as I read the first chapter of Genesis to them. We talked about the value and uniqueness of each human life. We also read several Proverbs that describe the elderly. Then we made a second list on the whiteboard, sharing the things we'd heard and read in s

The Books are Coming! The Books are Coming!

Friday, June 1 This is the news we've been waiting for... the books are coming! After all our hard work transcribing interviews, writing careful notes, rough drafts, peer editing, more drafts, revisions, sidebars, pictures, covers, layouts, etc., etc, we got our transcripts to the publishers last weekend. We're so excited for the arrival of this box of treasured biographies!!

Planning our Visits to Village Manor

March 15, 2018 During the March break, I was thrilled to have the chance to meet with Michelle, the activities director at Village Manor, to talk about the possibility of partnering together on a project that included residents from her workplace and the seventeen grade 7 students in my Composition/Literature class. Village Manor is a charming retirement community in the heart of Waterdown - about a 20 minute bus ride from Providence Christian School. The building is beautifully decorated, and the staff are warm and inviting. I knew immediately that it was a perfect fit for the project that my students have been preparing for. We discussed project details - how many residents would be sharing their stories, how many times the students would come to interview them, etc. As we ironed out the nitty gritty details, I had the chance to meet a few of the residents who happened to be passing by, and when they heard about the project their eyes lit up at the thought of sharing t

Crowns of Glory Project

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