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1 Immigration Stories Learning Activity Plan 5 What is a refugee and why do they leave their homes? Lorrie Heard Fall 2013, WOK: History/SS Clark University I. Content: Describe what it is you will teach. What is the content? This lesson will be the fifth in my Curriculum Unit Plan on immigration. My Essential Question is why do people leave their homes? and students will continue to analyze this question by looking at the immigration story of Sudanese Refugees as told in Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan by Mary Williams. In this lesson students will also begin to bring together everything that they have learned about immigration by comparing the stories of all of the different characters they have met in the stories throughout the unit. II. III. IV. Learning Goal(s): Describe what specifically students will know and be able to do after the experience of this class. Students will continue to think about the reasons why people leave their homes, by looking at a story of people who were forced to leave. Students will continue to think about the challenges people face when they leave their homes. Students will be able to define the term refugee and think about them in the context of what they already know about immigration and it challenges. Students will be able to find the continent of Africa and Sudan on the globe. Students will compare the immigration stories of all the characters we have read thus far in How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting, Angel Child, Dragon Child by Michele Maria Surat, Amelia s Road by Linda Jacobs Altman, and Three Young Pilgrims by Cheryl Harness. Students will begin to think about their own immigration stories. Rationale: Explain how the content and learning goal(s) relate to your Curriculum Unit Plan learning goals. Brothers in Hope is a story very different from all of the immigration stories we have read thus far. It depicts the long struggle of immigration for children who were orphaned by war. I think that students will really be able to relate this story to the ideas that we have discussed throughout this unit. There is clear evidence of why the boys had to leave their homes and there is also a clear description of challenge and hardship. I also hope that through this engagement with true challenge, students will continue to build historical empathy for people who have left their homes. I also have chosen to include this story in my unit because it adds to the diversity of immigration stories that students will see with a story from Africa. Out of all our students I would guess that only one, Abdullahi, truly is familiar with stories and information of Africa because his mother emigrated from Somalia. I am excited that this will be an introduction for many of them to the continent and its culture and history. Assessment: Describe how you and your students will know they have reached your learning goals. The assessment for this lesson will include two things. The first is that students will be creating a caricature of a character that we have read about in one of our

2 stories. They will have to include specific details about the character in their caricature but they will also have to be able to share with the class why they left their homes and what were some of the challenges that they faced. The second assessment that we will begin is their immigration stories. For homework, they will complete an interview with their families to find out information about their immigration story. Later, as a final assessment they will write these immigration stories and share them with their classmates and other students in the school. V. Personalization and equity: Describe how you will provide for individual student strengths and needs. How will you and your lesson consider the needs of each student and scaffold learning? How specifically will ELL students and students with learning disabilities gain access and be supported? While the caricature will be a group effort, each student will be expected to contribute to the project. Students will be supporting each other through this process as they collaborate together. I will think a lot about the make up of the groups as well to make sure that the work will be evenly distributed and that ELL students and students with learning disabilities will be adequately supported and able to work well with their peers. For the family interviews, I will scaffold with questions that they will ask and information that they will be looking for. I will also send home a letter with the interview to parents explaining why the students are doing this and what they are doing. The results from the interviews will be highly personalized as every student s immigration story is different (I expect that different countries, reasons for leaving, generations, time periods, etc. will all be represented in their interviews). VI. Activity description and agenda a. Describe the activities that will help your students understand the content of your class lesson by creating an agenda with time frames for your class. Be prepared to explain why you think each activity will help students on the path toward understanding. Part I Time Activity Rationale Introduction of Book - What is a refugee? Define and describe. - Where is Sudan? Find on globe. - Read afterword to give students more information - Answer Questions Read book - stop throughout to check for understanding and to make sure students are listening and engaged - why did the boys leave their homes? - how many times did they leave their I think that the topics that will be covered in this book will be largely unfamiliar to my students so a proper introduction is necessary for them to understand what is going on in the story and to be engaged with the material and not distracted by all their questions or confused. I will take my time to read the book which means that we will probably need to do the activity the next day. This book is fairly dense and long and so I want to allow for more and a more in depth reading of the book if it Heard 2

3 homes? why? - what were some of their challenges? means that students will have a better understanding and be better prepared for the activity that follows.. Part II Time Activity Rationale Introduction of Caricature assignment - clear instructions for assignment - clear expectations of group work - modeling of how to make a caricature with Squanto example Caricature Assignment Presentations - with clear expectations beforehand Clear instructions and expectations will ensure that students know what to do and how to do it. Students will be able to show which character they most identify with by describing them in detail through this creative caricature assignment. We have had some issues with students being disrespectful of other students when they are presenting so I want to stress the expectations for their behavior. b. What particular challenges, in terms of student learning or implementing planned activity, do you anticipate and how will you address them? I expect that there will be some challenges in implementing the lesson over two days. I will address these issues by making sure that I can teach the parts of the lesson back to back. I also expect that there will be some challenges with the caricature assignment. I will consider these challenges closely when making their groups students that have trouble cog up with creative ideas will work with students who are more creative and more driven. I will also model the caricature assignment before students begin so that the instructions and expectations are clear and that students will feel more able and ready to complete the assignment. VII. List the Massachusetts Learning Standards this lesson addresses. MA Learning Standard 3.3 Identify who the Pilgrims were and explain why they left Europe to seek religious freedom; describe their journey and their early years in the Plymouth Colony While this lesson doesn t directly address this learning standard it directly relates to my Essential Question. Massachusetts Learning Standard 3.3 is what my unit is based off of. MA Learning Standard 3.12 Explain how objects or artifacts of everyday life in the past tell us how ordinary people lived and how everyday life has changed Brothers in Hope is a secondary source, it depicts the true story of refugee boys as told to and by author, Mary Williams. Students will be able to use this source to learn key specific knowledge about a group of people and their immigration story. Heard 3

4 VIII. Reflection a. In light of all areas of planning, but especially in terms of your stated purpose and learning goals, in what ways was the activity(ies) successful? How do you know? In what ways was it not successful? How might the activity be planned differently another time? For this lesson we read Brothers in Hope and I feel that I really learned a lot about my students and their needs from this lesson. One thing that I did and it was kind of unplanned was I introduced the term refugee at the beginning of the lesson. I was pretty sure that they wouldn t know what it meant but I asked anyway. Only one student had previously heard the term and he guessed that it was a camp my guess was that he had heard the terms refugee and camp spoken together before. Instead of simply telling them what the word meant I decided to have them think about it and find clues in the story to help them figure out its meaning this worked out so well! The word came up several times throughout the read aloud and my students did such a great job inferring its meaning from the clues that they saw. Some of their responses were it s a camp for boys who lose their families during war, it s a camp and school where boys can go when they don t have a home, it is when you go to another country when there is war in your country, and it is a safe place. As you can see in their responses I only had to help them in understanding the difference between refugee and refugee camp. I had some concerns at first about reading Brothers in Hope. First of all it is a very long story the picture book is forty pages and some pages contain up to four or five paragraphs of small text. I was detered to introduce this story to my students but I knew that my students would not be able to sit through the book cover to cover. Another concern that I had was that the book would be too heavy for them issues like starvation, war, death, and extreme poverty are prevalent in this story about orphan boys who had to walk hundreds of miles to find safety without the guidance of an adult. Would they understand? Would they have anyway of relating to the story and identifying with the characters? Some of the same issues were mentioned in some of the other stories that we read but the seriousness of the issues were glazed over without much detail. But overall, I really wanted to read this story. Continuing with my commitment to cultural variety, I really wanted them to get the perspective of an immigrant from Africa and to talk about that part of the world and think about life there and to just be aware of it. We also have a student whose mother was a refugee from Africa. He is the only student in our class that is connected to that part of the world and I wanted him to feel as included and connected to the unit as most of my other students had. I took out many pages of the story to lessen the length and amount of time students would have to sit on the rug and listen. This helped a lot because instead of spending 45 utes reading I was able to cut it down to 20 utes (which I found is a lot for these students) including some stopping time for discussions about the story throughout. I also made sure to have a lot of discussions throughout the read aloud I wanted to support their learning as they were cog to an understanding of what life was like for these refugee boys. I made sure to ask a lot of questions to get students to understand the challenges they went through and to help them develop historical empathy. I don t think that they came to empathize for the story s characters as much as I had hoped they would but I definitely had their attention. Lots of hands were up when I would stop for discussions and quite a few students were asking me not to skip any pages Heard 4

5 when I read the story. Several kids have also looked at this book when they have had some moments for free reading time. At one point I was reading about how the boys were walking on their journey and they were so thirsty that they had to drink their own urine. The looks on their faces were shocked and one student asked me Miss Heard, is this a true story? Some of the concepts were definitely a lot for them to grasp but I allowed them to ask questions and I also allowed other students to answer their peer s questions. We did end up doing the caricature assignment the following day and because it wasn t directly related to Brothers in Hope splitting the lesson into two days worked out fine. I also was able to spend more time modeling the caricature assignment. Consequently, this assignment worked out so much better than any of the other ones that I have introduced so far in this unit. I was able to show them exactly what I expected by doing an example on the board with their input. Many students referred to that as well as some questions I put on the board to help them think about what else to include in their drawings (Why did they leave their homes? Who are they what do they do? What is their life like? What is their personality like? What are the challenges they face?). I introduced the assignment as a group project but almost all of my students (except for Abdullahi who hates any assignment involving art) wanted to make their own caricature, so they worked with a partner on thinking about the assignment but created their own. It was the first time my students were ever excited to work on something alone and I think a big part of that was simply because they really understood what they were supposed to be doing. The presentations on the other hand did not go so well. Since my last lesson we haven t been able to introduce a presentations structure and system and so the same issues were showing up students weren t listening to each other, students were having unrelated side conversations, and students were held accountable to respect other students while they were presenting. The presentations also took forever because everyone had to make a presentation of their own since they did their own caricatures. Looking back, I really wish that I had thought about doing a gallery walk instead because that would have been perfect for this assignment. It would have been exciting for them to get up and move around and maybe be able to make comments on other students work and it would have introduced them to a new way of learning and exploring other students work. It also would have allowed us to avoid the formal presentations which intimidate a lot of my students and aren t always necessary for sharing work. Most importantly it would have had all students engaged and we wouldn t have had to deal with students being disrespectful towards their peers. b. What did you learn from the experience of this lesson that will inform your next LAP? One thing I learned from this lesson is how well my students are able to infer and learn things from their experiences with literature. Because I gave them clues and something engage their thinking while I was doing the read aloud I think their attention was a lot more focused and they were much more involved. They also had great ideas when I asked them about the term refugee after the read aloud. In future lesson, especially when I am worried that the literature is too long or too dense for my students, I know that it would be a good idea to have something that their ds can be actively engaging with during the read aloud. Heard 5

6 Finally I was able explain an assignment clearly enough that they knew what to do and they were excited to do it! I can really see how important it was that I took that extra time to instruct them (even though it probably took 10 utes longer than I expected) their questions were answered before they had to ask them and they were confident going into the assignment. From now on I definitely will model whenever possible and try to make sure students have the clearest understanding of an assignment before they are sent off to work on it. The last thing that I will be thinking about as I continue on throughout this year is different presentation formats. Having students present their work one at a time seems like the most logical method to me because I know that it is something that is important for them to practice, it is something that you often see happening in classrooms, I have done it myself a million times, etc. But I have begun to realize that it is not always the smartest and most efficient way to carry out student presentations. I definitely want to try out a gallery walk style presentation and having them share or write comments, questions, connections, etc. on Post-It notes would be fun with proper modeling and expectations. Heard 6