Gary Strong Curriculum Center - College of Education, Health and Human Sciences: Immigration/Refugee Experience

When Saya's mother is sent to jail as an illegal immigrant, she sends her daughter a cassette tape with a song and a bedtime story, which inspires Saya to write a story of her own -- one that just might bring her mother home.

Contains short stories, poems, biographical accounts, and essays about the immigrant experience and asks are we still a melting pot? Or are we a salad bowl. How should we manage immigration in the future?

Literacy focus: vocabulary, consonant digraphs, long vowel sounds, identifying main ideas, cues and effect. Social studies focus: discusses immigration to the United States in the 1800s.

Carl Erik journeys with his family from Sweden to America during the famine of 1868.

A thirteen-year-old Jewish orphan reluctantly leaves her grandmother and immigrates to New York City, where she works for three years sewing lace and earning money to bring Grandmother to the United States, too. Suggested level: primary, intermediate.

As Mario and his Papá travel from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with Mamá, Mario's wonderful new shoes help to distract him from the long and difficult journey.

"A boy travels across the sea in a rowboat in search of a new home, making a journey that is long and difficult--but also filled with beauty and hope"--

With haunting echoes of the current refugee crisis this beautifully illustrated book explores the unimaginable decisions made as a family leave their home and everything they know to escape the turmoil and tragedy brought by war. This book will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

A young girl describes her feelings when her father decides to leave their home in Mexico to look for work in the United States--

Explores the experience of immigrants who came to America in the twenty-first century, celebrating the diversity of the country and hope for the future.

Presents profiles of fourteen teenagers from countries around the world, revealing their struggles to fit into American society and their personal triumphs.

While on a school field trip to an orchard to make cider, a young immigrant named Farah gains self-confidence when the green apple she picks perfectly complements the other students' red apples.

Writing in the notebook which her teacher gave her, thirteen-year-old Celiane describes life with her mother and brother in Haiti as well as her experiences in Brooklyn after the family finally immigrates there to be reunited with her father.

Exiled to the United States after her father, a Middle Eastern dictator, is killed in a coup, fifteen-year-old Laila must cope with a completely new way of life, the truth of her father's regime, and her mother and brother's ways of adjusting.

"On a small plot of land in Mexico, a young boy and his sister run and play in the fields while their mother and father farm. All this changes, though, when the men of the village, including the boy's father, are forced to seek work north of the border, in the United States. Left alone with no way to make a living, the boy's mother decides that the family must make the dangerous journey across the border in search of both work and the boy's father"--Blurb from accompanying sheet.