Fifth graders at Welsh Valley Middle School recently completed an engaging interdisciplinary project as part of their Black History Month programming combining elements from their English/Language Arts (ELA) and Social Studies classes. As part of the project, students each selected an influential African-American figure before learning as much as they could about their life and achievements.

After completing their research, students were tasked with thinking about the lives of the people they researched in the context of a book each student recently read in their ELA classes entitled Front Desk, which tells the story of a young girl named Mia and her parents, who live and work at a motel. The family tries to help immigrants and others-in-need maneuver the many obstacles they face, despite the risk it poses to Mia and her parents. Mia, who wants to be a writer when she grows up, has to use the creativity she employs while writing to solve the big problems confronting her family.

Like Mia and the other characters in Front Desk, everyone has their own challenges they face while living out the stories of their lives, which cannot help but overlap and “weave” together with the lives and stories of others. With this in mind, students were asked to think about the lives of the iconic African-Americans they researched and the obstacles they overcame in their own "stories" before creating a patch to recognize and honor the life and work of their research subjects. The patches were then “woven” together to create a big, beautiful quilt! The project allowed students to celebrate the differences and similarities of their selected historical figures as well as the common threads that run throughout our lives tying us all together!