Our school has been pushing writing in ALL areas, even gym! I found this to be a fun way to get kids to do some writing, and in fact our 2nd grade classroom even wrote a book and published it...had a party and everything. The book is in our library to be checked out, and many parents purchased a copy!

While looking at A Great List of OER Resources, I found G4C. I thought I'd see if there were any online games students could play to add to the immigration unit. Not only did I find a great one on iCivics called Liberty Belle's Nation, it also linked me to lesson plans with learning objectives, readings, a variety of activities to access comprehension, Scholastic Teacher links to interactive tour guides of Ellis Island, virtual field trip links, graphs with data, and (Scholastic) lesson plans on this topic, leading from the past to present.

I was looking for ideas to add to our immigration unit. This was full of ideas! I found 7 different lesson plans that contained videos, text, hands on research/analyzing/presenting activities complete with rubrics! The one I found most interesting was looking more at current immigration issues, and with countries bordering the US.