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As a follow up to Jessica Lander's visit, students were asked to share what food or dish they would bring to a lunchtime meeting in Lander's classroom, and also which dish they would like to try from one of the students in her class who come from around the world. Students were then asked to describe the dishes using sensory and figurative language. The results were a myriad of delicious dishes, but descriptions that were a bit vague. Students said that dishes were delicious, yummy, and tasty. The problem is, what does delicious, yummy, and tasty actually taste like? To show kids that delicious, without context, can mean a variety of things, I gave them a survey and asked them, "What does delicious taste like?" Here is a sample of their answers, which quickly showed them that delicious is a vague term.

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We used Liz's Executive Function class to practice using a CATEGORIZATION Brain Frame. Kids observed popcorn being made in the air popper, then they sampled it. They recorded their observations on a brain frame, and then shared their answers and added their peers' ideas to their lists.

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Jessica Teaching the Unit with an Arrow Pointing to Her Book, Making Americans

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Jessica Lander is an FSS graduation who was in my (Jenn's) class 25 years ago as a seventh grader (FSS class of '02). She has since gone on to Concord Academy, Princeton, and Harvard and into teaching history at Lowell High School. Her class is made up of immigrants from around the world. After five years of teaching, Jessica took a year-long sabbatical to travel the US in search of other schools who have strong strategies for teaching immigrant-origin students. The results are her book, Making Americans. Jessica taught a class to the Unit students about belonging, and we subsequently read the opening of her book. The chapter describes how at lunchtime, her students come to eat lunch and bond about their differences and commonalities. One thing they do is share their culture's foods as a way to get to know one another. Our students followed up reading the chapter by writing about what food they would bring that represented them, and also what foods they would want to sample if they joined into the lunchtime crowd. We will continue to read from Making Americans this spring.

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Students worked in pairs researching different groups that immigrated to the US. They looked for the pushes and pulls that caused people to migrate, primary source voices that describe the experiences in first person, maps of where people came from and where in the US they moved to. Students then looked up the percentage of immigrants that live in their states and put a color-coded card on the giant classroom map. This allows us to easily see the states how immigrants are distributed in the US and we will discuss this in the coming weeks.

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CLICK ON THE POPCORN TO SEE THE STUDENTS' WORK

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Writing Samples of Students' Sensory Description of Popcorn

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Writing Samples of Students' Sensory Description of Popcorn

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Students took their Brain Frame notes and wrote short stories that included popcorn. They then self-selected excerpts from their writing and added them to this Padlet. Click on the image of the popcorn to see the results.

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Students worked in pairs listening to two different immigrants' stories to see what more modern immigration looks and sounds like. The overall assignment showed that there is no one story. That immigrants all have their own journeys. You can look at the videos students watched and check out the database of hundreds of immigrant stories by clicking on the girls picture above.