KIPP Scribes

I read a variety of blogs each week, and one of my favorites is The Wren's Nest Blog from Atlanta's Joel Chandler Harris House Museum, which I visited last summer (you can read about that here). In February, I saw a call to volunteers on Twitter for a project The Wren's Nest and nearby charter middle school Kipp Strive Academy were teaming up to do.

The gist of it is that writers from the Atlanta area are paired with fifth graders to help him or her write a narrative of a story told to him or her by a family member. It's about several things: teaching interviewing skills, transforming interview notes into a story, preserving family history, and involving the community at seriously, the coolest school I've ever gotten to check out.

Really, it didn't take any time at all for this to be the thing I spend all week looking forward to. This week was my third meeting with my student. He is smart, funny, animated, excited, energetic, and just a fun person to spend some time with. I'm so excited about the story he is working on, and I can't wait to see it in print this fall at the Decatur Book Festival, where the students' stories will be unveiled in a published book.

The Wren's Nest Blog is continuing to talk about this program. You can read their take on it here. And, fellow volunteer Jamie Allen is writing about it on his blog, too. Check it out here and here.

More to come on this, I'm sure!

Volunteer Opportunity

Since my visit to The Wren's Nest (home of Uncle Remus author Joel Chandler Harris) last summer, I've been reading their blog. Friday they announced on their blog their team effort with the Decatur Book Festival and a local charter school, Kipp Strive, to help 25 fifth graders become better writers and capture stories from their own families. The Wren's Nest is looking for volunteers to partner with the students on Tuesday afternoons from 3 to 4 p.m. from April to June for a total of about 10 hours of service. Visit their blog for more information about how to volunteer.

The Uncle Remus Museum

I recently visited the Joel Chandler Harris home in Atlanta knowing that the following weekend in Eatonton, Georgia, I’d visit the Uncle Remus Museum. It’s in two adjoining log cabins at Turner Park a few blocks south of downtown on the main drag. The cabin is representative of the cabin Harris visited often as a child on a nearby plantation. There he first heard the stories from the slaves that he later wrote down and published as the Uncle Remus tales.

The museum charges $1 per adult for admission, and a docent knowledgeable about Harris’ childhood can give information and answer questions. The first room has a small gift shop area and prints from Disney’s movie interpretation of the stories, Song of the South. Also in the first room are carved wooden characters representing several of the well-known stories.

The second room is filled with household items from the Civil War era. They are labeled with what they are and in some cases, the name of the person who donated or loaned the item. The items are varied and include such things as old letters, a corncob pipe, a pair of children’s shoes and a carriage lantern. While these items are all interesting in their own right, what is obviously absent are the connections these items have with Harris’ childhood on the plantation. Clearly, many of the items were not used by Harris, though he likely would have used some like them. Are the items simply there to show what would have been available for use at a typical Georgia plantation home? Without helpful information posted visitors will never be sure.

If you must pick only one of the two Harris museums in Georgia, spend $8 and visit his home in Atlanta. The authenticity is what really impressed me. The detail that your tour guide will go into about Harris and his home and family is all extremely interesting and worth listening to. If you’d like a bit of plantation history and to see Civil War-era items, then stop in at the Uncle Remus Museum.

House Museum: Joel Chandler Harris

The name Joel Chandler Harris may not be as familiar to some as the characters he immortalized. For over a century, Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear and the Tar Baby have played tricks on each other, visited the Laughing Place and generally cut up and carried on as told by Uncle Remus. The stories appeared in newspapers, storybooks, a Disney film and in oral tradition. Though the stories about this cast of characters originated on Southern plantations and were the stories slaves told their children, Harris, then an associate editor at the Atlanta Constitution, began writing the stories down and publishing them.

The Uncle Remus tales are considered by some to be outdated and politically incorrect by today’s cultural standards, but all that aside, the stories are just plain entertaining.

The Harris home, nicknamed The Wren’s Nest, is located in Southwest Atlanta’s West End neighborhood. It is Atlanta’s oldest house museum. The furniture in the home was used by Harris, his wife, and their six children. On a tour of the house, visitors learn all about the family and their time at The Wren’s Nest and Harris’ writing career.

The house is open for tours Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. If you can, try to make your visit coincide with Saturday’s storytelling, which begins at 1 p.m.

For more information on Harris, the Uncle Remus tales and The Wren’s Nest, visit www.wrensnestonline.com.