This link I have found is to a K12 project on immigration from the American Immigration Law Foundation, and details a lesson plan for teachers teaching this subject. It is packed full of activities to get the students involved and actively learning about it. The task is aimed at 4th to 8th graders, set over a couple of weeks. The objective of the project is stated as "To make the study of immigration a meaningful experience for my students and to give them the opportunity to discover how important the immigrants have been to our culture." I feel that this is a great objective, as it gives students the opportunity to go away and find out about immigrants in a way that impacts them, by having them find out about their own heritage to show how important immigration was and still is to the United States.
An example of a task each student is asked to complete, here it is an Immigrant Profile
Tasks within the project include getting the students to use the Ellis Island website to find the origins of their ancestry, and interviewing relatives to find out about their own personal history. Part of the project is re-enacting the moment of immigrants coming over to the USA, giving students a chance to experience what it would have felt like. The end result of the project is each member of the class giving a short presentation on their findings about their own heritage through immigration, and why immigration is important. This is a brilliant way to get students physically involved with discovering the importance of immigration, getting them interested in where they individually come from and how immigration plays a vital part to American heritage and culture, by getting them to think about it on a personal level.
In terms of whether this project looks at immigration from the viewpoint of either the melting pot, the salad bowl or the tapestry-mosaic, I think that this completely depends on the approach taken by the teachers and the findings of the students. If it leans towards more of one than the other, I feel that melting pot may be the approach here, as it emphasises that although all the students have unique backgrounds, they have all blended together as Americans within the classroom. The difference which may arise between the heritage of some students may however point more towards the tapestry-mosaic theory, showing how the mix of cultures co-exist in society, but do all fit together.
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