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Lone Grove: Window to the Past

Marvin Hamilton
Lone Grove Middle School, Lone Grove, Oklahoma

Subject: Community Studies
Grade: 8

"Even new students not native to this area feel a real part of the community now, since they interviewed senior citizens, helped take pictures of personalities and scenes, and researched the town's history."

Purpose and Description of Project

Marvin Hamilton guided five eighth-grade social studies classes in an investigation of their town's past, with the goal of increasing their knowledge about their community and their pride in it. The students' final product, a slide/tape show, not only achieved this goal, reports Hamilton, but "became the talk of the school and the community."

In preparation for developing the slide/tape show, each of the students researched and wrote about some aspect of local history. This included work in local libraries, but Hamilton says that because written material was scanty, the students also went into the community to interview family members and other citizens. He says, "even shy and timid students" gained new communications skills.

Once the research had been done, students took slides of old photos, historical sites, and personalities who were involved in some aspect of their town's development. The script to accompany these slides was drawn from their papers, recorded by selected students and the teacher, and synchronized with the slides and background music. The final product has drawn not just requests for showings to community groups but individual requests for copies of the production.

Activities

Students wrote individual research papers on some aspect of community history after they gathered information from local libraries and personal interviews. They also wrote to people who had left the town or who lived elsewhere but had had relatives in Lone Grove. The resulting papers discussed points ranging from the history of old buildings to the building of the railroad and the establishment of the town's telephone system.

The youngsters went out to photograph actual sites and individuals and worked in library settings to make slides of historical pictures and other materials. They had to produce slides that would suitably illustrate the working script that they had developed from their research papers, and to shoot slides that would generate emotional effects as well as demonstrate facts.

Students and teacher then organized the slides selected for the final product, recorded the narration, mixed in music, and synchronized the narration to the slides. This effort, according to Hamilton, was particularly valuable in that it gave the students an awareness of the nature of creativity since the "script, music, and pictures were synthesized into a whole much greater than the sum of the separate parts."

Materials, Resources, and Expenses

The entire community served as a resource through information and photos for this project, according to Hamilton. The school librarian and library aide also assisted, not just with camera instruction, but throughout the project.

Equipment included a 35 mm camera, two copystands, a camera that fit the copystands and a sound mixer. Film required included 14 rolls of ISO 400 slide film, four rolls of cartridge film (ISO 64), and three rolls of color print film. Since the equipment was available in the school media center, primary expenses were for film and development of slides and prints.

Outcomes and Adaptability

Hamilton found that his students "learned about their local history, how to cooperate better with each other, how to take effective slides and pictures, and how to organize varied material into a unified whole." They also learned both traditional and personal research techniques, including how to gather information through interviews, and gained an increased sense of community involvement and pride.

Hamilton believes that any community could benefit from a similar student production about local history, and he points out that the project could be modified to require much less sophisticated equipment than he and his students had access to.

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