Reading and Writing Workshop (March)
Reading in the Content Area: Immigration
In this unit, readers gather best practices in the teaching of social
studies or science, combining intensive non-fiction reading strategies with
inquiry practices, talking and writing to develop ideas. Readers will gather a
variety of texts, at different levels, so that all students can read texts they
can understand, and that they can read more than one text on a subject which is absolutely crucial to developing critical awareness of perspective
and point of view.
Students will learn how to read for knowledge, including how to assemble
and sort texts and resources, how to read first for big ideas, events, and
concepts, how to formulate essential questions and read to answer those
questions, how to read across texts, comparing perspectives and points of
view, and how to organize notes and reflective thinking to formulate personal
responses to what they are reading.
This unit of study invites children to research a historical period, which
our focus will be on Immigration.
Writing in the Content Area
In this unit, students will write powerfully about knowledge they have
gained in the content area of immigration. They will learn the tools to use in
the writing process including the study of mentor texts. Students will learn
to look to some of the actual genres that researchers write in after they
have done research or when they care deeply about a subject.
Students will be gathering information in their notebooks and also
using their notebooks to reflect on this information and build ideas. Some
ideas for a paper are:
 Family history
 Ellis Island
 Famous Immigrants
 Trip/ Why Immigrate?
 Tenements
 Work condition- sweat shops
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
Testing
Statue of Liberty
Websites to Use:
www.tenements.org
www.ellisisland.org
www.freeology.com