We had a terrific day. We caught the ferry to Liberty Island where the Statue of Liberty is located, and although we didn’t depart as we were on a time schedule for Ellis Island, it was still awe-inspiring to see Lady Liberty up close. Upon arriving at Ellis Island, we were ushered to a classroom that had recently been refurbished. We participated in an activity focusing on examining artifacts, documents and pictures to bring history to life. I like the way our two guides kept at us asking questions of “How do you know this?” and the like. It is a great three-pronged approach to history and I am going to add primary source documents to my classroom to go along with the pictures we are studying. I have some limited artifacts, but will make an effort to utilize these as well. We have a visiting teacher that goes to all the fifth grade classrooms and has artifacts from World War I and she keeps asking the students to conjecture what each item was used for and why. The kids spring alive for her hour and a half presentation. An hour and a half for two classes of fifth graders with zero discipline problems should tell a person that this is a great way to teach history.
From the workshop and after we donned our hard hats, we toured the hospital portion of Ellis Island in a behind the scenes tour. I love to see things like this that the public would never see, and my students will love the pictures I took of the dilapidated rooms and hallways. fifth grade students also like it when they are privileged to see things that many other fifth graders are not privy to. The guides used each room to extend the lesson from the workshop and kept asking us about the use of each room followed by “How do you know?”
Perhaps the best part of the workshop involved each teacher receiving their own jumpdrive loaded with pictures, maps, and illustrations of Ellis Island along with primary source document, lesson ideas, and resources and links to other sites. Every teacher I talked to was thrilled with this unbelievable resource as something like this should be common in our digital age, but sadly is not. I would hope that other places in the future could offer teachers this great courtesy.
In my classroom, I teach a novel, Letters From Rifka, about a twelve year old girl, Rika, and her family who immigrate from Poland and arrive at Ellis Island only to have Rifka left behind because of an infection on her scalp. The story is told using a series of letters to her friend back in the old country. She describes Ellis Island fairly clearly and the story makes even more sense now that I toured the medical facilities. We use this novel as part of our Courage Unit and Ellis Island is not really a focus for me in my teaching of history. However, with the material given to us, it will be easy to continue to teach the novel as before, but add a depth and historical perspective that would not have been possible before.
Coincidentally, I ran into my freshman high school English teacher and football coach from East High SChool. He was touring the facilities with his wife and daughter. Silvio is an author and has written the book The Death of Spring about the Ludlow massacre in the coalfield wars of southern Colorado. He has also published non-fiction articles about the massacre and on relations between labor and management of the early 1900’s. He has a new book out Achilles: In the Fire of Destiny.
