Culture and Heritage P.3: Our Heritage Project and Culture Quilts

As a summative assessment for our first unit of inquiry, Who We Are, each student completed a Heritage project.  This project was completed completely at home with the help of family members.  I loved how well it worked with our unit and allowed them to look a little deeper at themselves and their personal heritage.

This is what they were doing while I was enjoying my Golden Week vacation at the hot springs.  It was amazing. But that is another post.  Anywho, back to inquiry.

After the students came back from break we watched a reading rainbow about culture and it included a book about a little girl and her grandmother making a quilt that represented each member of their family.  Well, you know I can’t pass up a good craft.  Therefore grade 2 spent the next week making culture quilts.

Each quilt square is meant to represent a different cultural aspect that we have been studying throughout this unit.  All of them are personalized, providing each student a chance to show what from their culture is important to them.  The only instruction I gave them was to remember the discussions we have had about culture and what they learned working with their parents on their heritage projects.  I also provided the idea web we made at the beginning of the unit.  This was a way for me to see if they understood the concept of culture and were able to identify things in their life that had cultural significance.

I was bummed I could not think of an easy way for all of us to weave them together quickly, so I found the smallest tape possible and watched them figure out how to put the quilt together.  They quickly realized helping each other hold and tape each side of the square individually was the best way to keep the tape from messing up.  Haha, it was great watching them struggle.  Yes, they could have used box tape and it would have been easier and I may be a little mean, but they appreciated it a whole lot more after all the work they put in connecting each square.  They were not happy though when I flipped them over and quickly taped them again with box tape so they wouldn’t fall apart.

Once some of my students finished their quilts, the other students started seeing how big their classmates’ quilts had gotten and wanted to make theirs as big as possible.  They looked amazing when they were all done and paired with their heritage projects.