It’s listener suggestions that inspire the features that make up our weekly Bubbler Talk segment. But Bubbler Talk itself was the inspiration for a student project that played out earlier this year in the community of Slinger.
Slinger Middle School English Language Arts teacher Paul Walter runs an authors camp each summer in the district (Slinger Future Authors' Camp), with nearly two dozen participants from grades 6-12. Their project this summer: create Bubbler Talk-style features about the lesser-known history of notable places in the Slinger area.
"We wanted to think about something that really was a community interest piece - kind of a human interest story, and we know that we have these great places in Slinger that people know about but they don’t really know about," Paul Walter explains.
The pieces themselves came together in the weeks after the camp ended and were created by small groups of students who came together to create questions and plan out each piece.
"We just kind of tried to figure out, you know: where does this transition go? How do we lead into this piece? And we were just having a lot of fun doing it," says Abby Walter, a 7th grader at Slinger Middle School and Paul's daughter.
The pieces focused on a variety of local haunts, including the Little Switzerland ski resort, the Slinger Super Speedway race track, and an ice cream shop named Jim's Place.
"It was really kind of interesting, just learning about the entire history of what happened... how it started out. And I was learning about events that - I lived in Slinger and I never really knew about, so it was really just kind of a cool thing, to be able to learn all of that history," says Rachel Muhl, a junior at Slinger High School and another participant in the Slinger Future Authors' Camp.
Have a question you'd like WUWM to answer? Submit your query below.
_
