The Children’s Family Story Project is soliciting entries from third- through fifth-grade students who write stories based on interviews they conduct with their grandparents or other relatives.
The best submissions will be collected and published locally.
Irv Green and Andrea Gross, a husband-and-wife team who operate Legacy Prose, an “heirloom books” business that produces autobiographies, are running the project.
The Colorado Department of Education, Gov. Bill Ritter and local mayors throughout Colorado are supporting the Children’s Family Story Project.
To enter, a child needs to interview a grandparent or other relative about an aspect of family history, and compose a story based on that interview.
“As long as the child gets a story down on paper, and tells the story in his or her own words, not a direct transcript of the interview, why should the process matter?” asked Green.
The stories must be between 500 and 1,000 words long, and must be typed and double-spaced. Each story should include the writer’s reflections on what he or she learned by interviewing the relative and discovering the details of the family’s own story.
The deadline for entries is April 30, 2007. Rules and other details are enumerated online at www.childrensfsp.com.
