In the past couple of weeks, we have been working on an immigration project. We had to interview an immigrant and make a video about it. I chose to interview my grandma, Susan Learner. Before she moved here her name was Shoshana. She originally lived in Israel with her parents and older brother.

The process of the interview was easy. We just had to think of 10-15 green light questions. (A green light question is a question when the answer is more than one word). It was easy to think of so many questions and I could have thought of a lot more but the most amount of questions we were allowed to have was 15, and I ended up having a total of 15 questions. Some resources/things that were helpful were other people’s videos. Watching former fifth graders’ videos helped me think of questions and the format that I am going to try to do for my video.

The experience of conducting an interview was challenging. It was not what I expected it to be. It took over an hour and because my grandma emigrated here so long ago so she forgot some things, and some of the things she forgot were important. It was also hard to get her to tell me more, I had to tell her things like “Describe…, Give details about…, …Why or why not?” These helped me get a lot more information out of her. I did the interview in person and wrote things down in a notebook. I learned a lot of interesting things but the most interesting thing I learned about her was that she didn’t just speak Hebrew in Israel or English in America, but she also spoke Hungarian and still remembers little things in Hungarian. She spoke Hungarian because that is the language her parents and older brother spoke before they moved to Israel where she was born.

Overall the immigration project so far has been exciting and fun. I learned to be patient and encouraging. I really hope that the rest of the project is as fun as it is right now.