Alva Review-Courier -

An interesting thing has happened in the ten years since Alva Middle School teacher Donna Jordan first involved grandparents as being the subject of an eighth-grade English class project. Tonya Phillips is now the eighth grade language teacher.

She has continued Jordan's idea of students conducting a grandparent interview, writing an acrostic poem about that interview, and then performing a public reading of the poem with the grandparent present.

"There aren't so many grandparents available anymore," Phillips has discovered. "Many grandparents are very young and have jobs they can't leave; in...