About the lesson

Developed by Ianne Sherry for her fourth grade students at Epstein Hillel Academy for their unit focused on immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century, this lesson plan includes slides, oral history clips, interview transcripts, and worksheets to make history. 

This lesson can be used as a stand-alone lesson on oral histories, or as part of a Social Studies unit on immigration.

Within a larger unit, it begins with an introduction of how to use photographs using visual thinking strategies (VTS) to learn about those historical moments and then build on that by introducing videos and audio recordings. With VTS we ask the questions “What is going on here?”, and “What do you see that makes you say that?” A similar framework is used with audio recordings.