Lesson Title: Adaptation, Tenement Living, & Finding Space (3 Lesson Plans) Developed by: Ellen Wasserman, Connecticut Suggested Grade level: Middle School and Junior High School

LESSON #1—WHAT IS ADAPTATION?

OBJECTIVES • Students will understand the concept and necessity of adaptation. • Students will identify some of the problems immigrants faced when trying to adapt to a new culture.

SUPPLIES • Readings from primary sources o Bintel Brief, a selection of letters and responses from the Jewish Daily Forward's advice column o The Spirit of the Ghetto by Hutchins Hapgood

LESSON • Initiation: Quick writes o Describe a time when you felt like an outsider. o What did you do to make yourself fit in? o Were you comfortable or uncomfortable after you made the change? Why? o How did you feel?

• Development: Discussion o Students share their writing. o What is adaptation? Why do people adapt? o How would you feel/how did you feel if/when you were dropped into a culture that you knew nothing about? o Read and discuss primary sources.

• Closure: Students make a connection between one of the situations in the readings and their life.

• Homework: Students measure the size of a few rooms in their apartment/house, including the room in which they sleep and list the things that are in their room.

LESSON #2—DEALING WITH SPACE: TENEMENT LIVING

OBJECTIVES • Students will simulate tenement living by living in recreated tenement space. • Students will make modifications to adapt to space.

SUPPLIES • Jacob Riis Images of interiors of tenements • Tape to outline a tenement space on floor • Copies of tenements space to scale

LESSON • Initiation: Students list o How many people live in your apartment/house? o Rooms in your apartment/house. o Everything you did in your apartment/house from the time you got home yesterday until you left for school this morning.

• Development: o Students read through lists and delete any activity that uses electricity or batteries or that uses heat or hot water. o Class discussion of what every day life was like in the tenements using images of Riis to illustrate the setting. For each image ask: What do they see in the image? What would it have been like to visit the space? What do they want to know more about? o Create an outline using tape of a tenement apartment on your classroom floor measuring 325 square. Divide students into groups of 5-7. Have each group take a turn standing in taped mockup of the tenement. Once seated in the delineated space, have students write about they feel and what issues being in the space raises such as privacy. If you are unable to simulate the size of a tenement on the floor of your classroom, use handouts of a tenement plan as an alternative.

• Closure: Journal write o Students compare/contrast tenement living with their personal experience.

• Homework: Distribute copies of tenement layout with the number of people living in the apartment. Have students “furnish” the apartment, marking on the layout where the furniture would go.

LESSON #3—FINDING SPACE—GOING OUT TO UNWIND

OBJECTIVES • Students will identify the function of a house of worship and as a community space. • Students will identify other “sacred” spaces. • Students will make a connection between their lives and lives of immigrants.

SUPPLIES photographs of Eldridge Street Synagogue, overheads of Lower East Side streets and parks, reading from E Pluribus Unum about meat boycott.

LESSON • Initiation: Review furnished floor plans and discuss problems OR discuss journal entries.

• Development: o Class definition of sacred. o Talk about synagogues/churches/other houses of worship. Why do people to to a house of worship. What does it provide? Why would immigrants want to start a house of worship? o Tour of Eldridge Street Synagogue—point out size, features, etc. o Distribute reading from E Pluribus Unum and discuss. o What other spaces could be considered sacred? Why?

• Closure: Make a connection between your life and the life of a teenaged immigrant. What do you do to relax and get away from your family? What did immigrant teenagers do?

RESOURCES • A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward by Isaac Metzker. New York: Schocken Books, 1971 • How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. New York: Dover Publication, 1890. Available online at www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/contents.html • The Spirit of the Ghetto by Hutchins Hapgood. New York: Schocken Books, 1966. Available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=rkafgS4CMGUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_summary_r&cad=0 Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement aka Five Cents a Spot by Jacob Riis Room in a Tenement,1910 by Jacob Riis