My name is Angela Hill and welcome back to my teaching blog! As written in my last post, I would like to teach second or third graders about immigration. Many students of that age may understand that their nationalities can be Irish, Italian or Puerto Rican, but a lot of them don’t understand exactly why it is like that. My partner and I have found the book, All the Way to America by Dan Yaccarino. This book is a true story based on a large Italian family and a little shovel that has gotten passed down to each generation that lives in America. The author’s great-grandfather left Italy and went to America in search of new opportunities. He brought along with him a little shovel his family would let him use while helping in the garden when he was younger. His parents gave him the advice, “work hard, but remember to enjoy life, and never forget your family.” The story goes on to the next generations who are given the shovel and the same advice. I feel as if this teaches students that their nationalities matter. I also believe they will be very intrigued that even past generations were not all born in America. The world is so big, yet they don’t realize that at such a young age. I also mentioned in my last post that I would like to focus on Gardner’s spatial and interpersonal intelligences because I believe students learn well with visuals and working together. As for the spatial intelligence, I can use pictures and have students caption them, or have a background video to play before the book is read. This will allow the students’ minds to start thinking of what we will be learning about. After reading, we can do a group activity to include the interpersonal intelligence. Throughout the activity, the students can discuss and write what they learned from the book and share. I think going about teaching this text this way will be effective because it gives students the opportunity to think about how immigration relates to them and their own family. We can also have a discussion on how immigration is still prominent in today’s world. The biggest challenge with teaching the text this way would be if a student doesn’t know their background and how their nationalities came to be. I had learned last year that it isn’t always easy to send students home the night before teaching a lesson and ask about their nationality or genes, for instance. You have to be aware that all students’ homes are different and it might be hard for them to either ask or get answers. Overall, I am very excited to teach this text as it provides very important history on America, and how America truly came to be.