Grandparents Booklet Computer Project

Hello and welcome to my Grandparents Booklet project in Microsoft Word. We have Grandparents Day at our school every other year and several years ago, I decided to create a memory booklet for the students to give to their grandparents. It was such a big hit that my principal has asked me to do it ever since.

In this booklet, students will learn how to format and create a biographical booklet about their grandparents in Microsoft Word. The computer skills they will learn include Word Art, Clip Art, centering text vertically and horizontally on a page and changing the font, size and color of their text. Included in this curriculum package is a sample of the project, detailed lesson plans describing each skill and a research sheet for students to take home to use during their grandparent interview.

To get started, they will interview their grandparents, if their grandparents are not avaliable, aunts, uncles or cousins will do, about their lives on the research sheet that is provided. Once the interviews are done, they will bring the sheets to class and use that information to create a booklet for their grandparents. The booklet includes a title page, the two inside pages with biographical articles on each set of grandparents and the back page with two paragraphs describing special memories the students have of their grandparents.

I also have my students draw two pictures in Kid Pix of things they do with each set of grandparents. If you don't have Kid Pix, you can just use Clip Art or pictures off the internet. If they students want to bring in pictures on flashdrives of their grandparents, they could include them as well.

I usually do this project during February and incoorporate it into a discussion of their heritage for Black History Month. One of the questions on the research sheet is about where their grandparents, or other ancestors are from. It's fun for the kids to learn that they have common heritages.

The best thing about this project is when the parents come back to me afterwards and tell me how much fun the kids had interviewing their grandparents. Some had to call long distance but it created a bond between the kids and grandparents that perhaps wasn't there before.

This project is designed to run for 9 weeks with students having computer class once a week. Obviously if you decided to work on this more than once a week, you could finish it in less time.

Thank you for considering my curriculum.