SERVICE LEARNING DAY 1 (24 October 2012):

Today was the first day we visited a participant. Her name was Elizabeth and is very close to Rachel, kind of a second grandmother. We performed both songs for her, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison and Twist and Shout by The Beatles. When we finished performing for her, she remembered a time when she was studying in college, when there were dance parties every weekend and everyone was good at dancing. She told us a story about a small, muscular man named Ray who had been her dancing parter for some time. She told us how in the middle of dancing, he had picked her up, thew her over his right him, brought her up, threw her over his left hip, brought her up, and then threw her between his legs and brought her up one final time. 

Overall, this day was a great success and was not hard to accomplish. We look forward to the upcoming service learning days, and the further recordings stories. 

         When we were planning during our last Service Learning preparation day, we created our project. Our plan is to give the elderly a chance to interact and be entertained by the younger generation as well as the opportunity to relive the best times of their lives: their teenage years. Because the residents of Laguna Woods Village live in a community of people 55 years or older, they rarely interact with people outside their retirement community. We will learn and perform songs from the 40’s 50’s and 60’s, perform two of them on each service learning day, film the participants telling a specific story from their teenage years that our songs bring to mind, create a collage of their stories and their faces when they listen to our performance, and send the finished collage to each of the participants we interview, thus giving them a chance to relive their teenage years through the eyes of others who lived in the same era. 




         Once we created our plan, we began to learn songs to sing. We now know "Twist and Shout" and "Brown Eyed Girl."

         Since our plan was presented to our panel, Rachel has announced our project to a few potential participants and they have excitedly agreed to participate in out project. Today we plan to visit a spunky friend and long-time foster grandmother of Rachel in order to hear her many stories. Wish us luck!