Geography, immigration, and emigration.

CONNECTIONS TO MANDATE/MISSION:

Accommodation necessary as people from different cultures or ethnic groups interact voluntarily and involuntarily.

CORE CONCEPTS:

• Change: how the lives of people can be changed by immigration.
• Conflict: how differences among groups are resolved.
• Culture: resistance to, and lack of, exchange of cultural ideas and values.
• Interdependence: how location, place, environment, movement and region influence people.
• Perspective: how people accept and reject stereotyping of others.
• Responsibility: the role of the individual in showing tolerance and the appreciation of diversity.
• Scarcity: how limited resources created systems of living and working.

During this unit, lesson, or activity, students, individually or in groups:

• Read and write diary entries about life as a new immigrant.
• Use maps, globes, charts, graphs, and other tools of geography to gather and interpret data and draw conclusions about human patterns of immigration or emigration.
• Study social customs, religion, art, literature and music of various immigrant groups.
• Research various immigrant groups and the reasons for leaving their homelands.
• Interview refugees and invite them to speak to the class.
• Implement clusters on Africa found in SS2000.
• Select contemporary emigrant groups (Ethiopian Jews, Cambodian, Taiwanese, Viet Namese) and compare and contrast their reasons for emigration.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Simon Wiesenthal Center
• Teachers Guide to the Holocaust
• St. Petersburg Times
• Ellis Island

As you enter the classroom, posters, photographs, artifacts, and examples of student work fill the bulletin boards, walls, and display surfaces. Students are in multiple work groups which are focusing upon topics related to examining how children their ages dealt with the conflicts created by the policies of apartheid in South Africa, displacement as a consequence of the war in Cambodia, and the resistance of ordinary people during the Holocaust.  Students are reading Journey to Jo'burg by Beverly Naidoo, Children of the River, by Linda Crew and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry.  Students from each of the literature groups will form response groups to discuss provocative questions about what they have read.  In these response groups, they will share historical information, view images, listen to music written in response to the historical events they are studying and discuss the experiences of the heroes and heroines of the books they have read.  The culminating activity will be a large group discussion and a group write where students will create the text and illustrations for a picture book about the attributes of people who deal successfully with conflict.

LEARNING ASSESSMENTS:

At the conclusion of units, lessons, or activities students might

• create a newspaper editorial on immigrants in the United States.
• create journal entries on the accomplishments of various immigrants.
• develop a community service project that focuses on helping an immigrant family assimilate.
• present student research projects in various visual and oral formats.
• participate in varied writing projects.
• respond to prompts based on literature read.
• create a picture book with text and illustrations on attributes of people that deal with conflict successfully.