Postcards from Ellis Island

My new Grade 4 Common Core ELA unit is about the stories of "Immigration."  My kids love it!!!  We have been reading many fictional and non-fictional books.  We even took a virtual tour of Ellis Island with Scholastic.

One of the activities that they loved were the Postcards.  We read the book "At Ellis Island: A History in Many Voices."  The book has so much going on...it takes 2-3 readings to do it justice.  We read it the first time for Sera's story (a fictional character).  The second reading we read and discussed the immigrants quotes and the captions.  There are many great photos and illustrations on every page.

The next thing I did was copy a page from "I Was Dreaming to Come to America" for every student, along with the short biographical page in the back.  I had them read the pages and write a postcard from the point of view of their immigrant.  We discussed that their postcard would be based on facts but will include some realistic-fiction details.

Here are some of their postcards:

Here are the Postcards I Made for My Display:

For information regarding US immigration please visit:

U.S. Naturalization and Immigration