The Immigration Experience

A checklist is available to assist students with organizing their research.

Step 1, Defining Terms
              Use the graphic organizer to define the words. 
              Click on www.dictionary.com to open a dictionary link to define the word:
                              immigration, examination, curable, inspector, tenement
              Next, click on http://bensguide.gpo.gov/3-5/citizenship/index.html to define the following
                            words: aliens, nationals, citizen, immigrant.
         
Step 2, Compare Ellis Island to Angel Island
              Complete the graphic organizer to compare the Ellis Island to the Angel Island immigration
                            experience as you view the following websites.
              First take the interactive Tour of Ellis Island.
              Now view Angel Island: Meet Li Keng Wong who arrived in 1933.
                 
Step 3, Think Like a Historian!  
               Do you know that you can find out a lot of information about a person without ever meeting them? 
               Primary source documents are one of the best ways to find out information about people you have
               never met.  Primary source documents are written records like government reports,
               diaries, journal entries, letters or postcards.  Historians use primary sources in their work. They  
               piece together information about a time, place, event, or person based on recorded information.
               Primary sources are essential to the work historians do.  You will do the work of real historians by
               examining the original documents of real immigrants that settled in the lower eastside of New
               York City.  So get your clip boards ready!      
      First, view and listen to a tour of tenement housing from the Tenement Museum and experience what it
                was like for millions of immigrants once they settled in America.  
      Next, examine the primary source documents and answer the questions about two of the original
                documents.  
        
Step 4, Yesterday and Today: the Immigrant Experience
               Now that you are an expert historian and you can describe what an immigrant’s experience might
               have been like in the early 1900’s and how their life might have been when they settled in
               America, now it is time to explore what some modern immigrants experiences have been.          
       View Scholastic's Today Meet Three Recent Immigrants website and use this graphic organizer to
               take notes on the experience of Kauthar Hassan, Virpal, and Quynh as they immigrated to 
               America. 

Step 5, Historians Read, Read, Read!  
      Take a look at the book list below and partner read one of the books.  When you finish complete a 
      reading response.     
           For A Better Life by Henrietta Schleif Pesce
           Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman
           I was Dreaming to Come to America Memories from the Ellis Island Oral History Project
              Selected and illustrated by Veronica Lawlor
           When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest
           A Picnic in October by Eve Bunting
           The Memory Coat by Elvira Woodruff
 
Step 6, All historians publish their work. 
      It is now time to report your findings.  Choose one of the methods to report your research from
      the choice board and let your teacher know which one you have chosen.