Time Capsule Immigration Story Project
NHPRC QIH Assignment Title:
Time Capsule Immigration Story Project
NOTE: This assignment was created by the participant educator named above as part of the Queens Immigration History curriculum development project funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission division of the National Archives (grant #DH-50022-16). For more information on this grant project, please visit the Queens Immigration History website at https://queensimmigrationhistory.wordpress.com
NHPRC QIH Assignment Creator
Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Rachel Wylie (C2, July 2018 – June 2019). Ms Wylie is a current secondary social studies teacher for the New York City Department of Education. Wylie has been teaching for three years and has spent her career teaching at Bayside High School. Wylie has a M.S. Ed and second teaching certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and works closely with New York City’s English Language Learning (ELL) and immigrant populations. Her focus is in teaching Global History in a sheltered instruction environment for ELLs. Wylie is also a product of the NYC DoE school system and has lived her whole life in Queens, New York; she is a member of the community in which she works.
Summary/ Description Overview:
Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Rachel Wylie for Global History. Adaptable to other grades. History is the study of the past based on available evidence at the time. In this project, you will create a time capsule full of evidence to allow your descendants to better understand who you are, your immigration story, and what life was like in 2018. This opportunity allows you to use evidence to enable future generations of your family to reconstruct your personal past. Each student’s time capsule will undergo peer-analysis of the primary evidence provided in the capsule.
Purpose/Learning Goal
1. To apply historical thinking, understanding of primary source evidence.
2. To create a project that connects personal Immigration history to Global history.
Tasks
In this project, you will create a time capsule full of evidence to allow your descendants to better understand who you are, your immigration story, and what life was like in 2018. One of your classmates will use your time capsule to analyze the evidence you provide.
Task 1: Create a time capsule
Create a time capsule* full of evidence to allow your descendants* to better understand who you are, your immigration story, and what life was like in 2018. Your Time Capsule MUST Include:
- Current Autobiography (1 paragraph typed)—The autobiography should include your name, nickname, birthday, age, what language(s) you speak, what country did you come from, birth order and siblings/family description, neighborhood you first lived in upon arriving to the United States, neighborhood you live in now, what year did you come to the United States, how long have you been in United States.
- Primary Source Documents – must include the following primary source documents: 1 newspaper article, 1 something that proves you are a student at BHS (copy of program or ID or picture etc.), 5 photos, 1 diary entry (How did you feel in your first week arriving to and adjusting to life in the United States? How do you feel now?), 1 letter to or from a friend (can be screen grab of text message or note passed in class or post card etc.), 5 other artifacts, 1 map of a significant place to you (could be neighborhood map, school map etc.)
- Actual Immigration Story -- (typed essay- 4 paragraphs) — must include family story of why your family decided to immigrate to the United States. Must include push factors (reasons to leave your home country) and pull factors (reasons to come to the United States / New York rather than another country/ state).
- Reflection (1 paragraph typed) — how will this time capsule help the future generations of your family learn about the past? What can they learn about you based on this evidence? What do these documents reveal about life in 2018? What do they reveal about your bias/perspective? How does it help people in the future understand your immigration story? How do these sources work together to tell an accurate representation and story of what happened in your personal past (corroboration*)?
Vocabulary for Task 1
* Time capsule: a container storing a selection of objects chosen as being typical of the present time, buried for discovery in the future.
* Descendants: A person that has come from a particular ancestor; future generations of your family, example- children, grandchildren.
* Corroboration: evidence that confirms or supports a statement, theory, or finding; confirmation
Task 2: Analyze another student’s time capsule
Open the time capsule of another student. Analyze* the primary source evidence within their time capsule and answer the following questions based on the evidence. Use a separate piece of paper to answer the questions, or use this Peer Analysis Template.
- Who is the author? (Whose time capsule did you analyze?)
- Where is the author from? (home country and current residence)
- When was this evidence created? (year)
- What are 4 facts about the author? How do you know these 4 facts? (What documents provided the evidence for you to know these 4 facts are true?)
- Why did the author’s family choose to leave their home country?
- Why did the author’s family choose to come to the United States?
- Are these primary sources reliable*? Why or why not?
- What can you learn about life in 2018 because you analyzed this primary sources in this time capsule?
Vocabulary for Task 2
Analyze: discover or reveal something through detailed study/ examination.
Synonyms→ examine, inspect, survey, study, scrutinize
*Reliable : consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted
Synonyms→ dependable, good, trustworthy, well founded, authentic, genuine, true
Assessment/Rubric
Attribution
This NHPRC Teacher Participant assignment was created by Rachel Wylie
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States