In The Classroom: Beginning to Read The Arrival

Today I began by reviewing with the kids what we’d done so far. We then looked at several reproductions of immigration-related artifacts from The Ellis Island Collection. This wonderful publication is a box of beautifully reproduced documents related to Ellis Island. Today we looked at a steamship poster, two steamship postcards, and a ship’s manifest from 1903. This last document kept us occupied for some time. The amount of money, the question as to whether the immigrant was insane, and so much more was indeed fascinating.

I then put the kids into groups of three (homogeneous by gender for a change), asked them to read the first section and then have one of their group be prepared to present what they discovered about the story to the rest of the class. This took a bit of time so they will do this tomorrow. In the meantime you can see some photos of the groups at work here.