Refugee

In this unit we will follow the journey of several refugees as their lives twist inside out and come back again. Students will study character development and connect ideas across many texts and cultures.

Building Schema:

Let's discuss what we know already!

NextGen Learning Standards: SL1, SL4, SL6

We'll start by discussing what students know already about refugees by participating in a 4-corner's discussion. They might not know much, but that's the whole point!

Slideshow Presentation

Bilingual Sentence Frames

Let's Observe Together!

NextGen Learning Standards: 8R7, 8W2C

Students will make some close observations of these images of refugees to practice making objective descriptions, and to build schema for our unit!

Slideshow

Form for Responses

Identity Box Characterization!

We use identity boxes to get to know each other, and to get to know our characters! An identity box puts together a series of images, words, quotes, and anything else that might represent you! Check out the exemplar identity boxes below!

Identity Box Template

Student Identity Box

NextGen Learning Standards: 8W3, 8W4, 8W5, 8SL5

Students will use the template to the left to create two identity boxes: one for themself, and one for one of our three main characters. It's an awesome way to show your knowledge of a character, and an awesome way to learn about our students!

Reading Days:

Standards: 8R2, 8R8, 8R9, 8W5, 8W6, 8W7

Josef

One group of students will read about Josef, a refugee during World War 2.

Mahmoud

A second group of students will read the chapters about Mahoud escaping from the Syrian refugee crisis.

Isabel

Isabel is a refugree from Cuba that a third group of students will read about.

For our first unit, our emphasis is on reading and understanding. It's a simple unit during which kids read an awesome, adventurous story, and their "evidence" they collect and the paragraphs that they produce essentially amount to objective summaries. As we move through our bias unit, food chains unit, and inquiry-based research, so too will our students understanding and ability to support diverse and well thought out claims grow!

Paired Texts:

While our anchor text, Refugee, tells the story of three refugees, we use some paired texts to broaden students' horizons about the worldwide plight of refugees.

NextGen Learning Standards: 8R1, 8R3, 8R4, 8R5, 8R7, 8R8, 8R9, 8W1, 8W2, 8W5, 8W6, 8W7, 8SL 2, 8SL3, 8SL5, 8L4

Alexander Betts

Alexander Betts shares some ideas about how the refugee system currently works, and what needs to change to make it work better!

Karen Flemming

Karen Flemming talks about how welcoming refugees is beneficial for both the refugees AND the countries that welcome them!

Amira

This article connects the story of Amira with our anchor text Refugee.

UNHCR

Students will choose some UNHCR stories of real refugees to connect with our anchor text.

Second a Day

This one second a day video captures the tragedy of life as a refugee child.

Final Essay:

Essay Description

Each student will write a beautiful body paragraph alone summarizing the journey of the refugee they were assigned to read. They'll then work with two other students to learn about the similarities and differences of each of the three unique refugee journeys.

Amazing Student Examples

Aniyah Ortiz, Cece Waite, Yaritza Willis

Success Skills

Read deeply for understanding. [8R1, 8R2, 8R7, 8R8, 8R9]
Identify bias and multiple perspectives. [8R3, 8R6, 8R8, 8R9]
Write informative texts to support a claim [8W1, 8W4, 8W5, 8W6, 8W8]
Choose compelling and insightful evidence [8SL5, 8W4, 8W6, 8W8, 8W10]
Make connections across "texts." [8R1, 8R2, 8R5, 8R3, 8R9, 8W4]
Refine and revise work by engaging with a structured peer-review process. [8W5]

If you liked our Refugee unit, check out our Unconscious Bias research unit, Food Chains and Inquiry-Based Research units to see a similar structure applied to different topics!

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse