For many Americans Thanksgiving is one of the few times, perhaps only time, that extended family gathers together. It can be a great time for grandparents and grandchildren to talk to each other. I know that my mother cannot wait to talk to Isla even though she’s only three months old and doesn’t say much yet. As I mentioned in a post last month, StoryCorps wants people to record some of the conversations that happen between generations of families during Thanksgiving.

The Great Thanksgiving Listen is an initiative intended to facilitate conversations between students and adult family members over Thankgiving weekend. StoryCorps has released a toolkit for teachers to use to guide students in the process of recording interviews with family members. In the toolkit you will find an interview planning sheet and two pages of interview question suggestions. The toolkit recommends using the StoryCorps mobile apps to capture the conversations. The StoryCorps mobile apps includes question prompts and a suggested script for conducting interviews.

As an alternative to using the StoryCorps apps, your students could record by using The History Project’s free recording and timeline tools. That tool lets you make audio recordings to add to a timeline of events.