Edison and El Sol - Partners for Living History

Thanks to the International Media Exchange in Kalamazoo, Michigan, students from Edison Environmental Science Academy and El Sol Elementary are working together to create videos of the Latino community in Kalamazoo. These videos will present historical accounts from real people in Spanish to help preserve their stories for generations.

The partnership is off to a great start with the Edison VJ's (video journalists) in 5th grade working with 5th grade students at El Sol. They are learning how to ask good interview questions, how to conduct an interview, and even getting interviewed themselves!

The end result will be a series of videos to be posted on the web and broadcast on the Public Media Network on local cable television. Here is a quick video showing one of the sessions where students from both schools worked together on this wonderful and promising project.

Preparations from Edison Environmental Science Aca on Vimeo.

Service and Learning

We started the day with a great discussion of plants again. There are so many things to learn about plants! Later this week, we are going on a field trip to a place that uses plants that are grown locally. That will be fun!


Today we finished up at the house of the Grandpa of one of our students. We got a lot planted yesterday, but today we did the edging and added some wood chips.

We came back, cleaned up, and starting working on our memory book. Mr. Gettig showed us a website where you can build a picture book and add your own stories. We thought about the adventures we have already had in Garden Camp and started to put them together as story pages in our book. When the book is done, we will all get a copy of it to remember this summer by.

Speaking of books, the nice people from Kazoo Books came by and brought us three big stacks of books that are related to our summer program and our Magnet school theme. Because they looked for all of these books just for us, now the nice people at Kazoo Books understand better what we are learning at Edison and will let us know if they see more books that would be good for us!

After lunch and reading, we had another great lesson from Mr. Johnson and Miss Smith. They are great teachers and keep our attention. They really make learning about plants fun!

We finished the day with a snack and listening to our book being read to us. Tomorrow, we will learn more about plants we eat and why it is good to eat locally grown food.