Activities
Detective Boxes
Detective boxes are a great activity for your students to incorporate many teaching strategies peer teaching, student presentations, inquiry based learning, and culturally responsive teaching. For this activity you will need 6 plastic bins or cardboard boxes to story the pieces in the activity. These bins or boxes will vary on size depending on the materials you decide to put in. In my bins, I plan on putting in a name card of the person, baby of some sort with their birthdate on it, tombstone with death date if required, a flag of their home country, an item or image which represents their career, and an item or of an award or honor they have earned. Some examples could be a picture of the person, ice skates, a medal, a book, etc. Since your students will be pretending to be detectives give them a magnifying glass, and paper that they can fill the information as they work. Some items you might want to add on the paper are images with the corresponding words. For example: a baby with birthday next to it, or a tombstone with the word death. This will help students who cannot read yet, or do not speak the language. It makes it more inclusive for them in the activity. This activity will be done during social studies.
For this activity, students will be grouped together to explore and work together to figure out who their person is. They will pretend they are detectives, and go through the boxes to discover clues. They will write down the information with the corresponding image. Once the class is done, they will give a presentation at the end to the class about their person using the props they have in their box. Students will keep this paper for their next activity during writing.
Informational Writing
Once the detective boxes activity is done. Students will hold onto their paper to write an informational essay. Students should be encouraged to do more research on the person that they had. This may be student books on the person, story print outs, multimedia approaches (internet, presentations, books and articles). Students will need an example of how to take their research and write an informational piece. This can be done as class, step by step, or in small groups to help students form their ideas. This is great to help push your high students to add more or challenge them. It can also be done to guide your on level groups, English language learners, and below level groups. This will allow you to help with sentence structure, formatting, and basic writing and phonic skills needed. To finish this activity up, students will draw a picture of what they learned about the person or of the person. Make sure you hang up their work to showcase what they have learned.
Narrative Writing
For the narrative writing activity, start by reading various stories (fiction and non-fiction) about immigrants and their story. There are many books, articles, and videos on immigrants coming to America. These stories should be read during writing or reading, or social studies to open up the activities. Students will be more involved if it is about other children and their families. The next step for this activity depends on whether your students have access to their family immigration stories. For some students they immigrated here or their parents or grandparents have. While other students cannot trace their roots, provide them an opportunity to write about family traditions that they do (based on their culture or not) or a cultural meal they eat based on family roots.
Provide your students with access to questions they can ask their families. For families that have their immigration story some of these questions could be: What country and year did you immigrate from? Why did you leave? How was your journey? What was your first impression of America? What was hard about immigrating to America? What is you favorite memory about your journey? Some questions you may have your students who cannot trace their families immigration story are: What is something your family does to celebrate their culture? What family traditions has your family created or passed down? Explain these traditions and how they may you feel. Once students have completed this portion of the activity, they can begin their narrative writing or the poem activity. Provide several examples of what narratives are.
For students who do not know their ethnic culture or family’s immigration story, read the poem Where I’m From By George Ella Lyon to them. Then help them fill in the template. Based on student’s ability they just fill in the template, rewrite the template with the information they inputted, or type up the information and print it out. Then work in small groups with students on how to organize and write their narrative or work on their poem, while focusing on the basic writing skills. Modifications will be needed for students who are below grade level, special education, or are English language learners. Students will then present their work to educate about their family’s culture and immigration story, as well as their immediate family culture and traditions. These activities when finished being presented, would look great in frames either hanging in the classroom or outside of the classroom to show of their work.
Online Interactive Activities
Another great activity can be found on the Scholastic website. It is a teacher’s activity guide called Young Immigrants. It is very interactive. There are 5 children you can click on to learn about where they came from and their experiences. There are three other tabs to click on. There is an Explore Ellis Island, Immigration Data, and a Virtual Field Trip to Ellis Island. They are all-interactive or are videos and help tell the stories of immigrants from the past and the trends for immigration for over the years. There are even suggestions for activities you can do to continue the lesson.
Guest Speaker
Another great resource and activity for your students is having guest speakers come in. These can be siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, or someone from the community to share their immigration story with their students. This gives students a primary resource to learn from and a chance to ask questions. Make sure to screen the guest speaker, and get the proper background checks. Write some points for them to cover, or ask them to share some food or a game from their country. This activity is a great way to build a community and connect home to school.
Resources
Teacher resources for activities
http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/young_immigrants/ This is the link to the online interactive activities from scholastic.
https://www.leeandlow.com/collections/immigration-collection This link takes you to a website that allows you to explore fiction and non-fiction stories of immigrants.
https://www.sausd.us/cms/lib/CA01000471/Centricity/Domain/3043/I%20Am%20From%20Poem.pdf This link contains the poem and the format for the poem used in an activity in this unit.
Stories: When This World Was New by D.H. Figueredo, Coming to America: A Muslim Family’s Story by Bernard Wolf, Dia’s Story Cloth: The Hmong People’s Journey of Freedom, etc.
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