Exploring Ellis Island

The fourth grade teachers were covering Immigration in the classroom. I thought about what I'd like to do in order enrich their learning experience. Sometimes you'd like to take 80 fourth grade students and head down to Ellis Island to visit and learn more about our country's history, but you just can't afford to do so. Luckily, the Internet, as I've explained to students, allows us to take a field trip without actually physically moving from our seats, which is cheaper than a field trip. Students used some amazing websites to visit Ellis Island, take notes and then create a PowerPoint presentation using the information that they gathered from their visit.

Here are the links to the websites that we used:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork//laic/episode4/topic2/e4_topic2.html

http://www.ellisisland.org/

http://www.history.com/topics/ellis-island

And here's a video of the kiddos actively engaged in exploring Ellis Island via live cam!