Photo Credit: Ludovic Bertron via Compfight
Jennifer Kovarik from the Vesterheim Museum came to talk to us about immigration on Monday. This is the first step on our immigration immersion unit that we do in conjunction with the Museum.
Along the way we will be asking ourselves these big questions:
- Why did people uproot themselves from their homes and make the difficult journey to the United States?
- How did different groups make the journey?
- What was life like once these immigrants got to the new land?
I’ll give you more details as we go along the way. Just a heads up, though, in the next few weeks the children will need to decide on who they will become so they can begin an imaginary journey as that person.
There are several ways to think of how to answer this question of identity. The choice is yours. One way is to see this as an opportunity to explore your own immigrant identity. Perhaps your child might adopt the identity of a relative.
Another way to think of this is as an opportunity to learn something more about a group that is different than your own. Perhaps one could imagine what the harrowing journey on a slave ship would have been like. Or as an Italian immigrant escaping devastating earthquakes and natural disasters; a Vietnamese boat person after the fall of Vietnam after the war; a Jew escaping Germany before WWII; an Irish peasant fleeing famine after the potato blights, or a recent Somalian refugee escaping a country without a real government for many, many years.
I have many books about different immigrant experiences so children have a lot of latitude on who they might become. The key, though, is that they choose someone whose life they are interested in learning more about.
We do not have to make this decision for a few weeks. This is “let it soak” time, a chance for the kids to explore, inquire, and think about all of the different groups who have immigrated to the US over the years.
