Coming to America

Next week we will be starting a unit on immigration. It was very hard for me to find many age appropriate resources on this topic so I decided I would just make them myself :) This is my unit that is available on teachers pay teachers. If you want to check it out just click the image. It includes

• Introduction to diversity with a suggested read aloud/activity
• Vocabulary words/definitions/examples
• A vocabulary flip-book
• Student friendly passage about Ellis Island
• Ellis Island sequencing activity
• Parent letter and outline for family tree project
• Suggested activities and outline for culture project

Week one of immigration is down and the kids seem to really be enjoying it. We started out by introducing the words immigration, beliefs, culture, and traditions. We have used these words repeatedly in both our reading and social studies.  We completed an activity that goes with the story The Crayon Box That Talked to show how diversity is a good thing. For the activity, I told the students to take out one color crayon and draw a picture. After a few minutes I told the kids that they could color a second picture using all of their crayons. They all started cheering! It was like I had given them the best gift ever :) They spent the next few minutes working diligently on their drawings. When the time was up I had the students write a sentence on the bottom of the paper telling which picture they liked best and why. All of the students picked their second picture.  We then brainstormed words that described the way the pictures made us feel and wrote them on the outside. It was very interesting to see the things the students came up with. When we were done we read The Crayon Box That Talked and discussed how having a world with all the same kind of people would be very similar to having a box of crayons with only one color, boring, dull, sad, etc.  Here are a couple of the students' papers.

 

Next, we discussed how immigrants have played an important part in creating our diverse country. We watched a video on Ellis Island on Brainpop Jr.  The students then paired up and read an Ellis Island article. With their partners they sequenced the events that the immigrants had to go through in order to become a U.S. citizen.

 

We included a leveled reader into our guided reading groups that also discussed Ellis Island and immigration. The kids had an automatic connection to it because it discussed a lot about the Statue of Liberty being the first symbol of freedom that was seen by the immigrants. This was fresh on their minds because we just finished up our symbols and government unit. I love it when things go together smoothly!

 

 

At the end of the week the students chose three of the vocabulary words and created a flip book with definitions and illustrations.

 

Next week we are going to shift our focus to culture and the meaning and contributions that different cultures have had on our country.