Three Classroom Resources to Engage Students this President’s Day

President’s Day will be celebrated on Monday, February 15^th. Usually when President’s Day is addressed in the classroom, it takes place in the primary grades with activities centered around some of the nation’s most revered presidents. But what if this year, observing this national holiday in the classroom was different? What if President’s Day was used as a springboard for engaging students in exploratory learning where they connect the study of our presidents and the power of the executive branch to the topic of immigration?

Here are three engaging resources, two of which are created using HSTRY, a digital learning platform, to help you plan an exciting lesson to teach about immigration. We encourage you to set-up a free teacher account on HSTRY in order to adapt the lessons and share with students.

1) American By Belief: A Family Story - Unless you are 100% Native American your family came to the United States from someplace else. People come for a variety of reasons — to work, reunite with family, get an education or sometimes in search of safety and freedom. This brief lesson is a perfect way to initiate a classroom discussion on why people migrate. You can also extend the activity with our Crossing Borders with Digital Storytelling lesson plan, as well as with the President Lincoln Cottage’s lesson plan for their American By Belief exhibit. The brochure of their educational programs includes a map to “Tell Your Immigration Story.” You can also email them for a free hard copy which makes for a larger classroom display.

An immigrant writes on note on the wall of the "American by Belief" exhibit at President Lincoln's Cottage explaining how she named her son after the President. Credit: http://lincolnscottage.tumblr.com/ 

Engage your students using this lesson we co-created with HSTRY. After you set-up a teacher account, click “copy the timeline,” then sort images and text (using a drag and drop function) into the six identified push/pull factors of immigration. Designed for primary learners (grades 3 and up), this lesson can easily be modified for older students. Students can copy the timeline and add more text and images to fill the categories. Debrief as a class and use the student handbook on HSTRY to properly cite online sources.

Click here to access the American By Belief: A Family Story lesson.

2) Lincoln and Immigrant Contributions to the Civil War – This lesson is almost guaranteed to deepen understanding of our nation’s 16^th president! In this lesson, students will evaluate the impact and reception of immigrants and their contributions to the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War and explore how immigrants view Lincoln.

Examining three essential questions about immigrant contributions in the Civil War, students sort the text and images to best answer the questions using the HSTRY platform. They add more resources through recommended sites such as the Library of Congress’s Civil War collection. This lesson is designed for high school students, who can then use sentence stems provided to write and discuss how immigrants contributed to the Union victory. Additionally, this lesson could not have been developed without the scholarship of Professor Jason Silverman, author of Lincoln and the Immigrant, and Patrick Young, Esq.

Click here to access the Lincoln and Immigrant Contributions to the Civil War lesson plan.

3) Two Timely Lessons to Teach about Executive Action: The President’s executive action on immigration has been greeted with joy, relief, sadness, and contempt. Just what is an executive action and how can students examine the multiple responses to it are the focus areas of our two popular lesson plans. It is a rich opportunity in the high school classroom to: extend critical discussions on the separation of powers, examine the effects of policy on individuals, and analyze the arguments made by both sides to help students become civically engaged and informed.

Click here to read our blog post about our lessons and access both of the lesson plans.

We seek to connect teachers and students with the most relevant, fact-based information to teach immigration critically and creatively–-at no cost. If you like our work, please share this email, tell a friend and give them this link http://bit.ly/1KdE5Zz to receive updates and free resources such as lesson plans, books reviews, and community grants. Follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration #teachimmigration.

New Lincoln Exhibit Encourages Immigration Connections for Educators and Students

“The United States of America is, and always has been, a nation of immigrants.” This is the first line of the “American by Belief” exhibit which opened to the public last week at President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C. and will remain open for two years. Through a series of colorful and descriptive panels, visitors are encouraged to draw connections between Lincoln’s largely unexamined history on immigrants and immigration and contemporary issues in U.S. immigration. President Lincoln’s Cottage consulted with the American Immigration Council on the current immigration policies contextualized in the exhibit.

Historian Jason Silverman’s book Lincoln and the Immigrant, provided much of the fascinating historical background for the exhibit. Notably, his book is the first in over 6,000 Lincoln biographies to recognize the important role immigrants had in shaping Lincoln’s personal and political beliefs, including his signing into law the 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration. Professor Silverman also discussed Lincoln’s immigration policy and the formation of his beliefs with the American Immigration Council’s Executive Director Benjamin Johnson who provided insight on current policies at a recently hosted event at the Cottage.

As the exhibit highlights, “Lincoln recognized immigrants as one of America’s greatest resources and its best hope for the future. He believed America offered immigrants the full realization of its founding promises and a fair chance to succeed.” One-hundred and fifty years later, many people are still arriving for those same promises and what unites us may be these indelible beliefs.

If you live in the Washington, D.C. area or are coming for a visit, we encourage you to see this special exhibit. Highly engaging, visitors of all ages can write their immigration stories, no matter how recent or distant, and visually display their journey on an interactive map. For those who can’t make it in person, you can also participate by downloading a copy of the “Tell Your Immigration Story” lesson plan which is built upon our “Crossing Borders with Digital Storytelling” lesson plan, featured in the President Lincoln’s Cottage School Programs brochure.

Additional Resources:

·       Read Patrick Young’s review “New Book Examines Lincoln’s Personal Relationships with Immigrants” on Professor Silverman’s seminal book Lincoln and the Immigrant, which “at just over a hundred pages…will leave you thinking for weeks.”

·       Read our article “Teach Empathy with Digital Immigration Stories” published on Edutopia which details the connections and opportunities for student engagement and inter-cultural understandings when sharing immigration stories in the classroom.

Stay Connected!

The American Immigration Council offers free lesson plans, resources, book/film reviews, and grants to teach immigration. We also welcome teacher and student book reviews and contributions to our blog. Email us at teacher@immcouncil.org and follow us on twitter @ThnkImmigration #teachimmigration. You can also follow the exhibit and President Lincoln’s Cottage @LincolnsCottage #AmericanbyBelief.