Social Studies Project: Family Reunion Mail Merge Word & Excel Computer Unit

Yep, that's right, you get to learn 2 programs for less than the cost of buying them separately in this Project!! Welcome to my Family Reunion Project in Word and Excel. If any of you know anything about mail merge, it's totally okay if you don't, you know that to do mail merge, you have to have a data source to work with. That's where the Excel part comes in. We are gong to create spreadsheets in Excel about our extended family. That is project #1. You will learn all about how to make spreadsheets in Excel. You will also learn how to use the sorting and filtering tools to narrow down the spreadsheets to just have the information you are interested in. Along the way, you'll learn all about cells, cell addresses, rows, columns, merge and center, borders, just to a few of the many skills you will pick up with just the first part of this project.
Project #2 is the Word part and it is soooo cool. Using the spreadsheets that you just built in Excel, you'll create an invitation to a family reunion for your extended family. You will write your invitation letter and insert mail merge fields so that when you are done, you have a wonderful letter with all the necessary information for your family reunion ready for all the relatives on your spreadsheets and you only had to type it once!! How great is that??? There is some creative writing involved and some internet research to figure out some activities and accommodations for the relatives in the host city.
This is a great skill to learn for students and teachers. You could do a personal invitation to 5th grade graduation to each parent and only type the invitation once!! Students have sooooo much fun with this.
Now, I know what you are thinking. "This sounds really hard." It is not hard at all. My curriculum includes step by step, easy to follow, lesson plans for Excel and Word. Make sure you do the Excel project first because you need the spreadsheets to do the Word project. I have samples of all the finished projects and parent letters to explain how this is all going to work. No previous computer experience is required!! I hope you will consider purchasing this curriculum. It will be the most fun thing you do with your students all year.