It sure has been a strange winter. It seems like forever since we’ve been in school. It is getting toward March, which makes me hopeful that we can lose the days off school and gain some learning time!
I wanted to let you know more about our immigrant immersion experience planned with the Vesterheim Museum.
Our first step in our immigrant journey is to create a make-believe identity as an immigrant. If you could talk with your child about this over the course of the week, that would be helpful. If you have a strong association with a country other that the U.S. I’d encourage your child to adopt an identity from that country. It might help him or her understand your family history a bit better. If you don’t, no problem! Encourage your child to adopt an identity from a country (and a time) that s/he is curious about.
Here are the things to think about.
1. A personal identity — a name and age and language.
2. The family identity: Who is in the family (their names) and what they do for a living?
3. A reason for leaving. What was the reason for going? We are talking about how some escape tragic circumstances (wars, famine, disease, natural disasters), political repression (pogroms, labor camps, lack of freedoms), and others seek greater opportunity (economic migrants).
4. A year of departure, a destination, and a job you will get to earn a living. We’ll be studying 19th and early 20th century migrants, but I’m encouraging the children to think about more recent migrants, too. There are no limits. The year of immigration will influence what you take with you, what jobs you will have, how you travel, and other things like what the final project will be. (You wouldn’t create a log cabin as a final project if you were immigrating in the 1990s, for instance!)
5. How America will be different than the country of origin? What will be missed and how life will change? We will be understanding this part of the immigrant experience over time, so no problem if you don’t know exactly how a new immigrant might feel in the new country.
I’m sure this will be an interesting experience for the kids! I can’t wait to get back to school to continue our voyage.
I love this idea and I am looking forward to helping out with this project. Are the kids reading books about the country and time period that they want to write about yet? I remember you said you had books in the room for them, but Dylan doesn’t seem to have much information of what to do yet. (I did not ask him about it today, but last weekend).
Yes, we do have some books in the room and I’ve encouraged the kids to explore them (some have!!) to figure out who they might want to be. We’ll be getting a lot of information from the 1880 – 1920 time period from our visits to the Vesterheim Museum in the next two months, too. It’s a large project that unfolds slowly, so we’ll be gathering, sorting, talking about stuff as we go.
The key is to pick an identity and a time period first. That way we can focus our energy on what that person’s life was like. We’ll try to make it as historically accurate as possible, but…we are in fourth grade and this sort of thing is new, too!