Unit Summary
History comes alive for students as they develop immigrant personas and become immigrants who make the journey from Europe to the United States. Once on American soil, they experience the immigration process as they participate in a simulation of the Ellis Island immigration station. Throughout this process, students create multimedia portfolios that illustrate their experiences. Students then assume the roles of their immigrants and share their experiences with the class. This exercise in creating historical fiction enables students to understand the motivations of immigrants and the challenges they faced. This is part of a larger immigration unit where students also study the experiences of other immigrant groups.

Curriculum-Framing Questions

• Essential Question
  Why take the risk?
• Unit Questions
  What was it like for immigrants as they traveled to, arrived at, and lived in the United States?
  How did the immigration experience differ for different immigrant groups?
• Content Questions
  Why did immigrants leave their homes to come to the United States between 1870 and 1930?
  How did the United States try to restrict immigration between 1870 and 1900?
  What is immigration and emigration?

Assessment Processes
View how a variety of student-centered assessments are used in the Destination America: Our Hope, Our Future Unit Plan. These assessments help students and teachers set goals; monitor student progress; provide feedback; assess thinking, processes, performances, and products; and reflect on learning throughout the learning cycle.

Instructional Procedures
Prior to Instruction
Compile resources (textbooks, encyclopedias, printed materials, and Internet resources) on European immigration from 1870 through 1930. Select primary source materials to help students learn about the “push” and “pull” factors that influenced immigration, such as government records, economic reports, and newspaper articles. Ships' registries and diaries will help students identify with individuals as they develop immigrant personas and engage in simulations.

Prepare student journals for students to use throughout the project to document research, relevant findings, and other responses to questions and discussions.

Getting Started
Discuss the Essential Question, Why take the risk? Engage students in a discussion about experiences in their lives or other people’s lives that have motivated them to change.

After a class discussion, have students individually reflect on the question in their journals.

Introduction to the Unit
Next, discuss the question, Who is an American? As a group, write an operational definition of American. To illustrate the rich heritage in the classroom, compile a list of all the countries students represent ethnically. Locate and mark the countries on a world map. For students are uncomfortable with this or do not know where they come from, be sure to include the United States.

Explain that between 1870 and 1930 approximately 30 million immigrants came to America from all over the world. Many of them were fleeing poverty, oppression, or disease in their native countries. Tell students that they are going to assume the role of a European immigrant who came to the United States during this time.

Share the project, explaining that students will choose an immigration group and conduct research about the group’s immigration experience. Based on this research, each student creates an immigrant profile and uses a personal journal to document and prepare for the journey to America. After preparing for their journey, all fictitious immigrants participate in a simulation of an immigration station. Once in their new country, immigrants reflect on their immigration experience and send letters home sharing their stories.

This may be a good time to set expectations by sharing the student project rubric with students. After the rubric is reviewed, allow students time to set up their own project timeline based on the discussed expectations. Students are required to complete all the projects but use the student project rubric to monitor and self-assess one of the following projects: family heritage interview, immigrant persona, or letters home. Use the teacher project rubric to assess the project each student chooses.

Show an interactive timeline of different waves of immigration at The Peopling of America* Web site. Focus students on the waves of immigration that occurred during the nineteenth century, and introduce the idea that migration has two parts—emigration (leaving a place) and immigration (entering a place).  

Discuss how the factors that influenced migration in the latter half of the nineteenth century included pushing factors (such as economic depression; climactic conditions, such as drought; social unrest; and overpopulation), and pulling factors (such as government incentives, personal opportunity, and free expression).

Have students begin thinking about the country of origin they would like to study. Introduce students to the human face of immigration through Seymour Rechtzeit's story at Scholastic's Immigration Page* or other stories at Family Histories* on the Ellis Island Web site.

Homework Assignment
To begin exploring the Unit Question, What was it like for immigrants as they traveled to, arrived at, and lived in the United States? have students interview family members to find out as much as they can about their origins and record the responses in their journals. If this is problematic for students, they can also interview teachers or friends. Questions might include, Where did our ancestors come from? When did they come to this country? Why did they leave their country?

Encourage students to examine family artifacts that can teach them about their heritage—artifacts include items such as photographs, war medals, old letters, and documents.

Provide sharing time in class the next day.

Immigrant Persona
Have each student select a national origin. They can choose the groups from which they actually descended or pick groups that they would like to learn more about. Choices may include German, Irish, Scandinavian, Hungarian, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, or Polish.

Using the Internet and other library resources, students should research their selected groups and create profiles of themselves based on the history of their groups. The profiles should be historical fiction. When researching information about immigrants from a selected country, each student should explore and record relevant findings in a journal. Students can use the following questions to guide their study:

• Why did the group leave their native land?
• In what years did the majority of people leave?
• What was it like for the immigrants as they traveled to, arrived at, and lived in the United States?
• How did the immigration experience differ among immigrant groups?
• What was life like in the group’s “old country”?

Encourage each student to prepare to journey to the United States by compiling fictitious documents, such as birth certificates, passports, health records, and so forth.

Immigration Station Simulation
Through this simulation experience, students begin to discover their answer to the Unit Question, How did the immigration experience differ for different immigrant groups? Students learn about European immigrants’ first stop in America—Ellis Island—through a simulation. Because this takes quite a bit or organizing, you may choose to teach about the Ellis Island experience without doing the simulation. Many Web sites provide a detailed look at the immigration station, including the following:

In preparation for the simulation, ask other adults to act as immigration inspectors. Set up a room with different areas, such as a waiting room, medical inspection area, interrogation area, detaining area, money exchange booth, and cafeteria.

Be sure that each student is familiar with the character he or she will be portraying. Explain to students that they will be going through a mock physical and psychological medical inspection where a doctor will look for medical and physical defects, and for signs of disease. Students will be interrogated by a legal inspector. If granted permission to enter the United States, the students will be administered the Loyalty Oath, or they will be deported.

Specific details for organizing a simulation of Ellis Island are available in Gateway, a simulation curriculum offered by Interact*.

Letters Home
After students have been through the immigration process, revisit the Curriculum-Framing Questions: Why take the risk?, What was it like for immigrants as they traveled to, arrived at, and lived in the United States?, and How did the immigration experience differ for different immigrant groups? As a class, discuss students’ answers to these questions and how their answers may have changed with their new perspectives.

Students can now share their experience with family members back in their countries. They do this by writing letters to relatives or friends in their old country. In their letters, each student should share details and feelings about the crossing, Ellis Island processing procedures, first impressions of the new country, challenges faced by new immigrants, and so forth. Have students get peer feedback before final revisions are made to their letters.

Multimedia Presentation
Share and discuss the presentation scoring guide. Have each student combine his or her work into a multimedia presentation about the immigration experience. The student example shows the immigrant persona and letters home. The multimedia slides can be used to support an oral presentation, in which each immigrant dresses in character and tells his or her personal immigration story.

Wrapping Up
Have students revisit the Essential Question, Why take the risk? and respond in their journals based on their research and experiences.

Differentiated Instruction
Resource Student

• Make modifications as dictated in the student's IEP
• Preselect Web sites and other research material appropriate for the student’s reading level
• Assist the student with note-taking techniques by making photocopies and having the student first highlight important information and then record that information in note style

• Create templates to help the student with the immigrant profile
• Review the interrogation questions with the student before the simulation
• If possible, have the student share immigration stories and call upon the student as a resource and “expert”

Credits
Karen March participated in the Intel® Teach Program, which resulted in this idea for a classroom project. A team of teachers expanded the plan into the example you see here.