Quick Summary
Minitex staff and librarians who work with eLibraryMN, Ebooks Minnesota, Minnesota Digital Library, and Resource Sharing have come together to create Resource Packs for Minnesota schools! This month's pack features fiction, nonfiction, and primary sources, about Immigration and Immigrant Stories.
Y. M. C. A. English class, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 1895 - 1900. University of Minnesota Libraries, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, collection.mndigital.org/catalog/umk:44 Accessed 24 Jan 2024.
Minitex staff and librarians who work with eLibraryMN, Ebooks Minnesota, Minnesota Digital Library, and Resource Sharing have come together to create Resource Packs* for Minnesota schools! This month's pack features fiction, nonfiction, and primary sources about Immigration and Immigrant Stories.
Understanding immigration issues and the stories of people who have emigrated from their homeland is an important part of being an informed citizen in our world today. Many learners in Minnesota classrooms are affected by these topics and need to learn about the issues from sources you can trust. If you want ebooks that the whole class can read together, young learners can enjoy picture books and stories on Ebooks Minnesota that reflect the experience of a child who is starting a new life in a new country with the Seeking Refuge series and Ellis Island, while older students can access Kao Kalia Yang's The Late Homecomer or Abdi Nor Iftin's Call me American: the Extraordinary Story of a Somali Immigrant.
Students in Grades Kindergarten-8 can read about topics related to immigration in Brittanica, and can change the reading level according to their needs. They can also use the new Ebsco user interfaces for elementary and middle school students to browse the Social Studies/Citizenship/Immigration theme with curated, age-appropriate items for their research and learning.
Middle and High School students can find the information that they need in the Gale in Context Middle and High School Immigration Topics, or browse the Points of View Reference Center' Immigration topic to access a point/counterpoint resource for the following topics: Border Walls, Dreamers and Legal Residency, Family-Based Immigration, Federal Identification Cards, Foreign-Worker Visas, and more.
Finally, primary sources are often the most impactful artifacts that make the stories real. The Minnesota Digital Library (MDL) contains many resources related to immigration and immigrant experiences in Minnesota, some of which have been selected for use in the classroom. Listen to oral histories of Minnesota immigrants, read the account of an immigrant from Croatia, examine historical photographs of immigrants in Minnesota, and view MDL’s online exhibit series on these immigration topics: People on the Move, Immigrant Experiences, and Preserving Culture.
These items and so many more are on the Resource Pack guide, and in the e-resources themselves. Have a topic that you'd like us to focus on in the future? Share it with us and we'll add it to the list!
*Resource packs are theme-based and support Minnesota K-12 Academic standards. We plan to release one resource pack per month during the school year, and fully review all content each summer to ensure that all resources are current and up to date. Please submit any ideas you have for resource pack topics that would be helpful for teachers and students and we will add them to the list of future topics.
Each pack will be in a Libguide format that librarians and teachers can share with colleagues. Resources will be curated around the month’s theme, and will be broken into tabs for younger and older students. Packs can be accessed by unlimited users with no login, and all links will be formatted to ensure seamless access within Minnesota borders.
