All dolled up for Thanksgiving

Danette Goulet

* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education

writer Danette Goulet visits a campus within the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District and writes about her experience.

Two at a time, children carefully tied little strings around damp

cornhusks as they began the task of creating their very own pilgrim

dolls.

It seemed a timely project, with Thanksgiving just days away.

But when the dolls are finished, students in Shirley Kwan’s

fourth-grade class at Kaiser Elementary School will not have created your

typical pilgrim scene.

“Pioneers are not just that group that came over on the Mayflower,”

Kwan said.

Each student will make their doll in the likeness of their own

ancestors.

“Mine’s gonna be Norwegian,” said Taylor Allee, 9. “I’m going to make

him a fisherman.”

The idea is to study different cultures and research why each group

came to this country, Kwan said.

Nelly Radeva, 10, explained that the students have a list of questions

to answer in the form of a short research paper, explained .

Nelly’s family is from Bulgaria, so she will make an outfit for her

doll that resembles Bulgarian dress for special ceremonies, she said --

red with flowers.

“Because now, they just wear jeans and T-shirts like we do,” she

explained.

For other students, the project wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

“I don’t know which I’m more of -- Mexican or Swedish,” pondered

9-year-old Jordan Wagner.

But it was not a cornhusk free-for-all in Room 20. Students started

making their dolls two at a time while the other students wrote to their

journal buddies.

“Today we’re telling them about how our weekend went and what we did,”

Nelly said. “I wrote about how I had a tennis tournament for doubles and

I got a trophy because we won.”

Students’ journal buddies are the parents of fellow classmates who

write back and forth with students each week.

FYI

WHO: Fourth-grade students

WHAT: Creating pilgrim dolls with cornhusks

WHERE: Shirley Kwan’s class at Kaiser Elementary School

LESSON: Social studies, cultural diversity