Museum of Tolerance
Oral History Activity
Oral history has brought a multitude of lessons, stories, and factoids to our current knowledge of the past. Let us continue to use oral history traditions through a lesson that encourages pupils to discover and appreciate where they...
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Immigration Oral History
Students explore oral history and how it is important to historical record. They interview someone who is a U.S. immigrant and create an oral history project/paper based on this interview.
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Immigration: Stories of Yesterday and Today
Students use Web technology to access immigration history and develop an understanding of the concept of immigration. Then they develop oral history writing skills, including note-taking and conducting an interview and read for detail....
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Coming to America
Through this set of three lessons about Ellis Island, class members will learn about why immigrants came to the United States, find out about the difficulties that went along with coming to America, become familiar with the immigration...
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Folktales: Oral Traditions as a Basis for Instruction in our Schools
Students visit their school library to read a variety of folktales. While they read, they identify the trickster or hero in each and discuss how the character represents the chaos in the real world. In groups, they write their own...
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Telling My Story: Conducting and Writing an Oral History
Students analyze the use of oral history as a way of gathering history. In this oral history lesson, students define oral history and then discuss researching immigration. Students research immigration. Students create questions for to...
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Immigration: U.S. Policy in the New Millennium
Learners explore U.S. immigration policies. In this immigration lesson, students read about the history of immigration policies in the U.S., uncover controversial issues regarding immigration, and speak to immigrants as well as...
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Immigration for Grades 6-8
Students explore immigration. In this immigration lesson, students research the topic and compare immigration of the past to the present. They create a decade long timeline of immigration.
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A Personal Narrative on the Immigration Experience
The students create a personal narrative on their experiences with immigration. In this instructional activity, students are asked to read and understand examples of narrative writing as well as evaluate lyrics from Ben Folds Five to...
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Oral Histories
One of a series of lessons from Ellis Island. In this lesson, students use research from a previous lesson to conduct oral history interviews of family members to learn about their cultural and ethnic heritage.
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Using Oral History to Understand Immigrant History
Pupils use oral history to comprehend how life chaned for men, women, and childern when they immigrated to the United States. Students conduct interviews with immigrants in an attempt to interpret hardships, lifestyles, careers, and...
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And the Streets Are Paved With Gold
Students explore immigrant experience at Ellis Island, New York, at the turn of the century, and answer questions that challenge them to use thinking skills from various levels of Bloom's taxonomy.
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The Immigrant Experience: Down the Rabbit Hole
Learners relate the immigrant experience to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In this immigration experience lesson, students read Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and relate it to the immigrant experience...
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My Antonia: K-W-H-L Strategy
Use the well-known KWHL chart as a tool for building up to a research project and oral presentation related to Willa Cather's My Antonia. Starting with a class brainstorm, pupils research and gradually narrow down topics relating to...
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Exploring Community Through Local History: Oral Stories, Landmarks and Traditions
Students explore the history of their local community. In this local history activity, students analyze primary documents to develop an understanding of the local culture and traditions of their local community.
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Virtual Ellis Island Museum Unit: Oral Histories
Students conduct oral histories of family members to explore their cultural and ethnic heritage after developing a set of research questions.
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Becoming American: The Chinese Experience
Students examine the experience of Chinese American immigrants in the PBS series BECOMING AMERICAN. ESL learners investigate and explore their own identities within a multicultural context.
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Coming To America
Students investigate the history of America with the help of children's literature. The story is structured as a timeline that begins at the time of Columbus and progresses to the present. The teacher reads the story with the class and...
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Shadow of the Dragon
Students complete literary analysis and a topic study for Shadow of a Dragon.In this literary analysis instructional activity, students complete a prewriting about the topics of gangs, Vietnam, and immigrants. Students complete 49...
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Studying the Caribbean Immigration
Students use the site maps and other resources to research one of the influential Caribbean immigrants or descendents of immigrants mentioned in a narrative they have read. They write an essay about an influential immigrant.
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What’s your Name?
Youngsters work to build empathy, cultural understanding, and a sense of self as they uncover the story behind their own names. They read the book, The Name Jar, discuss immigration and how it feels to be in a new place. Then, they...
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We the People (Cultural Research)
Fourth graders conduct cultural research, collect oral histories using tape recorders and cameras, and share their ancestral heritage with classmates through family heirlooms and ethnic foods.
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Unit Plan Template
Use this U.S. History unit plan as a template for creating your own! Simply download the resource and edit the text fields with your own customized unit plan. This is a great jumping-off step, especially for newer teachers.
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Immigration Explorations, Part 2
Students conduct secondary source research using the internet and library resources to learn more about the backgrounds of their family's cultural and ethnic heritages. Students can work together in research groups that have common...