Aspen Middle School presents sixth-grade capstone project, “My Great Realization”

In a continuation of our ongoing Silver Linings project, The Aspen Times has collaborated with the Aspen Middle School sixth-grade class to present their capstone project, “My Great Realization.”

The sixth-grade project required the students to reflect on the past pandemic year, the challenges they and their families faced and identify what positive experiences or silver linings occurred during the pandemic that they can bring with them as they move forward into the world.

“As teachers and as a school we really want to highlight that there’s been a lot of great things to come from this, and maybe silver linings or skills that we’ve developed that are going to be really beneficial for the world that we are going into that’s completely changed,” said Kristen Zodrow, a sixth-grade math teacher at Aspen Middle School.

In addition to self-reflection, the students interviewed family members, community members and people in the global community to hear their stories from the past year and discover some commonalities in everyone’s experience.

“The Aspen Times was in tandem doing a project like this for our community, so what we asked, ’Can our students be part of this?’” Zodrow said.

“We’ve had our students do everything in their own way (similar to) what The Aspen Times has asked the community to do, which is to leave behind all of the negative pieces and take with you the really valuable things that we’ve learned this last year so we can move into the world and be better people for each other, for ourselves.“

Visit aspentimes.com/great-realization-project/ to watch a selection of 12 sixth-grade students “great realizations” and Zodrow discuss the project further.

To learn more about The Aspen Times Silver Lining project, visit aspentimes.com/silverlining/.