Tips for Teachers
Dear Teachers,
First, thank you for your interest in this WebQuest. The WebQuest began initially as a Social Studies quest, but as we went on developing the activities and researching sites, it became much more. It should not be too difficult to modify some of these activities to use for history lessons, in English classes and more. While immigration is a touchy subject, we hope that this WebQuest will give all the participants a chance to understand and appreciate our American heritage.
You are free to use this WebQuest or any part as you see fit. What we do ask for, however, is for some feedback. We are particularly interested in things like the user-friendliness of the site, the content, the external links, and the sample lesson plans. If you've modified a lesson and found it to be a smashing success with your class, please do share your secrets with us! Please note that many of the images in this site come from external sources. All were marked as "free for non-commercial use" which basically means you can use the images your lessons too, providing that you do not plan on selling your lesson! Please see this page for a list of sources should you need to contact the original photographer for explicit usage permission.
Now, with all that administrative stuff aside....
Some of Our Suggestions
In the task at hand, please find the following information that may aid your students to understand how their families may have come to America.
- Part one of the tasks involves the students talking to their parents about how their relatives may have come to America. The following site is the site for Ellis Island and it allows the search of relatives that came from other lands to the land of prosperity.
- Part two discusses the reasons for and against immigration. The following website allows for assistance in aiding your students in understanding this concept. The website listed below is an excellent page that answers many questions as to why and how people come to America. It also discusses some of the laws that will need to be looked at when coming to America. An excellent site with much information.
- Part three is role playing. The students will have to pretend to be people thinking of immigrating to the US. You may want to present them with some issues such as political or religious persecution as a reason for leaving. You may use the webpage listed above in Part two as an aid to guide your students.
The goal of this WebQuest is to aid children in understanding why people want to come into our the United States. Currently, immigration—especially illegal immigration—is causing quite a bit of turmoil in America. Examples of this current event in the news can be found quite frequently. There are stories about people dying while entering the US from Mexico, and there are stories about Africans emigrating from their homes to be free from genocide and war. This WebQuest will help children better understand the promise that America has held in the past and continues to hold for many people. It will also aid in the instruction of where we, as a nation, came from.
In addition to the above resources, we have also developed some materials which may help you with your lessons.
- Be sure to create Passports for all the students. If you have a stamp, you can stamp the passports when they complete an assignment to immitate the effect of going through customs. You can use the passports to give feedback on different parts of the WebQuest as the student completes them.
- We have included a world map for use in the activity in part one. You may want to make sure that you have an atlas ready in case the students need to look up a certain country.
- We have also included an example lesson plan and a blank planning sheet (in Microsoft Word format) for your convenience.
Our evaluation rubric is left without points because its primary intent is to make srudents aware of the different tasks they should be working on in each part of the WebQuest. Should you decide to use the rubric as your primary mode of evaluation, we recommend having a scale from "1" to "4" for the responses, as well as a "5" in the case of outstanding work. Thus the maximum stated limit as per our rubric is 64 points, while the ultimate maximum is 80 points.
Links
The following links will help you with your lesson planning. Some of them lead directly to lesson plans themselves which can be modified to suit your needs. We have done all we can to keep the links accurate and to remove inactive links; however, if you do find a dead link, please use the contact form to the right and notify us of the error.
All links will open in a new window.
- Mexican Immigrant Workers and the US Economy is an in-depth article published by the American Immigration Law Foundation. The American Immigration Law Foundation also has a special section for teachers. This page includes the excellent document, Appreciating America's Heritage: Immigration Resource Guide for K-12 Educators, which includes things like lesson plans and book reviews.
- Embracing America: Looking at which Immigrants Become Citizens by the Center for Immigration Studies gives a very thorough overview of immigration policy.
- Discovery.com has an immigration lesson plan for 6th to 8th grade, but can be adapted to the 3rd-4th grade level. The site also includes many resources you may find helpful.
- If you are interested in modifying this WebQuest to relfect migration within a country, this might be a good starting point. This is a lesson plan that is directed towards outword geographic mobility, in this case a decision to move from Vermont.
- If you have an InstructorWeb account, you can access a lesson plan about Ellis Island geared towards literature.
