Folklorist Challenge: Discover From Near

The first project is 2014 Junior Folklorist Challenge. It is a project that encourages students to discover traditions in their own culture and share to the world. In order to complete this task kids can use the following four general steps. 

1. Research: a. identify a tradition; b. find a tradition bearer; c. develop your interview questions. 
2. Document: interview the tradition bearer and document the experience. 
3. Interpret: a. review all of your notes, audio, video and photos. Decide how you shape your story to share the tradition. b. create and polish your presentation as a video, a slide show or a podcast. 
4. Presentation: share on the ePals website. 

In my opinion, this project is good in many ways. 

First, it can help kids know the ways of discovering new things from every aspect of society. The first step, discover the tradition, gives lots of aspects for students to consider when they try to find a tradition to work. It can make kids more sensitive to culture features in society and lead them think more about that. 

Second, it can promote the speaking ability of students in their own language and extend their ability of language using. Because what kids do in school is mostly receptive and this project can let kids be the seeker of information. In this way, kids becomes initiator of their own knowledge and they try to find out better ways to get the information they need for their project. 

Third, the project is about history. It can not only help them understand the culture they're investigating, but also by comparison and contrast, they can understand the other cultures better. 

Fourth, students are not  alone in completing their projects. They can work with their parents, neighbors, communities, etc. They can also find useful information on the website and also get help from the teacher. Also, they can learn a lot from their peers worldwide. 

For classroom use of this project, I think it can be a 4-week project. Each week bears one step and students can communicate with their classmates during class and raise questions to their teachers. For ESL/EFL students, this may be an investigation to their own culture and prevention in English. To lower the difficulty, ESL/EFL students can be worked as groups of 2 or 3 people. It can help ESL/EFL students in many ways. The most important is to organize their language when communicating. Second, students have lots of topics to choose and these are open and easy to find in their own culture. Third, reviewing others' project can help enhance their reading and comprehensive ability. 

All in all, this online community can be good in sharing and learning and collaborating. It is helpful and fills the gaps of school and society.