Family Heritage Project

This is a project in which students examine their family and where they came from. It is a fantastic way for students, and teacher, to learn lots more about one another, and build empathy and community!

This project could be used during a unit about immigration, or simply as a way to get to know one another and see similarities and differences among students' family backgrounds.

This download includes one page that describes the project for students, a rubric to use to assess students' final product, and a two-page scavenger hunt that can be used when the projects are finished. Students put all the information they find onto a cube. I had my students trace the pattern of a cube onto a piece of poster board in class with me, using one 7 inch square piece of tagboard (it's a little tight, but it is helpful to have the cube be as large as you can make it). They then took the posterboard home and cut out and created the cube there, and affixed items to each side of the cube to make their own Family Heritage Cube.

When students bring in their cubes, I use the Family Heritage Scavenger Hunt worksheet and have students walk around, examining each other's cubes and learning more about one another and filling out the scavenger hunt worksheet. You can also have each student sit in a circle with their finished Family Heritage Cube and pass them around, pausing for a few minutes for students to examine one another's cube, before passing it along to the next person.