Immigration Project Reflection

This semester, in Mrs. Ganesan’s humanities we did a huge unit on immigration into America. I learned a lot from this unit and now know why we have such diverse cultures and food in America. The immigrants started coming here from Europe in the late 1800’s and it has grown ever since.
The first project we did for the immigration unit this semester was reading our immigration themed literature circles books and posting to our blog. I really liked my Lit Circles book (Hello America, by Livia Bitton Jackson) and I am very happy with my choice because it really showed what it is like to be a new immigrant and it shows all the life experiences that Elli (the character in my book) had as a new immigrant. I learned a lot of things from my book about how hard it is for a new immigrant to start their life in America with nothing. Elli and her mom came to America with nothing but a place to live at. They had to find their own way with no jobs and no money to their name.
The one thing I did not like is that you couldn’t discuss the book with your lit circles group members. All we did for the lit circles was post on our blogs and comment on other people’s blogs. We never got to discuss our book and say whether or not we liked the book. I didn’t necessarily like the blogging for our posts either; I liked what we did in the first semester where we wrote our quotes on paper and discussed the quotes with our groups. I would rather not blog for literature circles at all, but if we have to I would at least have to like the meetings back. I also think that our group all interpreted our book the same way and sometimes even had the same quotes. Overall, I would like the Lit Circles system to be changed, but I can live with it the way it is.
The second project we did for the immigration unit was actually related to our literature circles books and it had to do with art. We had to do a painting to represent a scene in our book or a new book cover. I decided to do a specific scene in my book which turned out to be a really good book cover. For my picture I did Elli and her mom standing on a boat looking at the Statue of Liberty which is a important part in the very beginning of the book. I really thought that it reflected on the novel I read because it stayed true to that scene and everybody in my group knew form what point in the book it was from. I thought that it was really fun to paint in humanities class because it was a nice change form the other stuff we do in that class. I thought that the final product of my painting turned out very good except for the face on the Statue of Liberty. I think that to enhance my final product I could have done better on my Statue of Liberty, and also try not to make as many mistakes in the colors that I used. I thought that doing a painting for literature circles was a lot better than doing a book review. I thought that using art to reflect on our literature circles books was a good, new, and inventive way to change lit circles.
The last project we did in humanities for immigration was the song that we had to write, sing, and create a music video for. Our topic was Filipinos and we wrote a song to the tune of the popular song, Soul Survivor by Young Jeezy and Akon. We had to research the Filipinos and what we found was very interesting.
My third project of the immigration unit was also my favorite. We had to find an immigrant and go interview them about their experience in coming to America. I thought that my interview process went very well. I did my first interview by phone, my second as the in person, and third interview by email. I did it different from everybody else because I was the only person to do the in person interview as my second interview instead of my third. I thought that it was good that we had to interview our person more than once. It gave you time to think of new and inventive questions while you also got time to space the whole interview out. In my first interview, I learned that Laura was a lawyer back in her home country of Romania. In my second interview I learned about Romania and how it was an unsafe communist country in the 1980’s and that is why Laura and her family left. In my third interview I learned that gymnastics were required in Romanian schools when she was a kid.
I thought that interviewing a person who came to this country helped me understand the immigration way better than I would have out of a textbook. The hands on experience really helped me learn about immigration and I hope we get to do hands on stuff like this in high school. The gift that I am giving to Laura is a painting. It was really cool to make it myself and I now know all the hard work that it takes to paint a 14 x 18 canvas. I really hope she likes my gift because I spent a lot of time on it.
Overall, I thought that the immigration unit in the first part of humanities was a very important one and I learned a lot from it. We did a lot of projects varying from paintings, to interviews, and to even singing and dancing.