What Would You Bring?

Activity Overview

To immigrate is to leave one place and go to another in the hopes of making a better home. Moving far away and leaving everything familiar behind takes much courage, but immigrants also bring the invaluable gift of expanding a community’s culture and creating a more connected world. In this activity, students will explore the idea of bravely going to an unfamiliar place by putting themselves in the shoes of the characters in our featured text. They will begin to make connections to the personal journey the character takes across borders and consider what a journey like that might feel like.

What You Need

• Dreamers by Yuyi Morales on Epic (before reading the text with children, we suggest adults preview the author’s page at the back of the book to hear more about Yuyi’s story)

• Paper

• Drawing materials

• Magazines or printed online images

• Scissors

• Glue

Steps

1. Read the story Dreamers with the students. Discuss how it might have felt for the characters to go somewhere so new and unfamiliar.

2. Describe the character’s journey to help students understand that some people travel very far to make a new home. Sometimes this means going from one country to another, or from one part of a country to another. Link this concept to any personal grown-up stories you want to share.

3. Present the challenge of pretending we are characters in the book too and how we might feel in a new and unfamiliar place.

4. What would you put in your backpack to take on an important and very long journey? Use magazines or printed online images with scissors to pick out images for collage and work with your student to practice fine motor skills when cutting. If you need to supplement magazine clippings or printed images with drawings, feel free to do so!

   1. Use the images you and your student collect for a collage (you can even draw a simple backpack shape on paper before you collage, to connect to the image from the text).

   2. If you are looking for an inspiring approach to this in a fun, lighthearted way, use I Have a Box to generate ideas.

Guiding Questions

• What would you put in your backpack to take on an important and very long journey?

• What are some things would you miss from home?

• What would you hope or dream to see there?

• What if you couldn’t understand the language people were speaking, or didn’t have a map of where to go? How would that feel?

Extensions

• Tell your student personal stories about immigration or moving from one place to another. Share photos or keepsakes that are important to you, or that may have been passed down for generations.

• Keep exploring books about immigration to normalize this often politicized process. We recommend you preview them first to determine if they are developmentally appropriate for your student. Here’s a list of good books to start with, which can all be found on Epic:

  • I’m New Here by Anne Sibley O’Brien

  • Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers

  • Wherever I Go by Mary Wagley Copp

  • The Arabic Quilt: An Immigrant Story by Aya Khalil

  • The Journey by Francesca Sanna