German and Irish Immigrants
In Antebellum America

About | K-12 Objectives | Materials Needed | Procedures | Assessment | Standards

Procedures

  1. Tell class that the objective of this lesson is to study immigrant communities in rural America in the 1850s and 1860s. In particular, students will be researching Irish and German-born residents of Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.

  2. Tell them that by the end of class (or however long you choose to take with this activity) you want the students to be able to answer the following questions. (It may be useful to write these on the board.)

     

  3. Tell the class that they will be answering these questions by working in small teams to explore a collection of historic documents from two mid-nineteenth century communities that had sizable immigrant populations.

  4. Divide class into five groups.

  5. Further divide each group into teams of 2-4 students.

  6. Hand out the following worksheets according to group.
  7. When students have completed this task to your satisfaction (and it is likely that this will take more than one class period) reconvene a whole-class discussion. Have spokespeople from each group present their findings.

  8. Then go back to the original questions (you may want to have them written on the board) and have students see how many of them they can answer from what they have learned.

 


Center for Technology and Teacher Education, University of Virginia,
This module created by Alice Carter of the University of Virginia.