During the last few weeks of history class, our 6th graders have been studying immigration to America. We’ve been focusing on the first great wave of immigration, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, where huge groups of immigrants were coming because of the promise of freedom and prosperity. To complete our study, we did an overview of all the periods of immigration and at this point we decided we needed to incorporate some math into our history class! We were looking at the huge numbers of people that have immigrated from different countries and regions at different points in history, and we wanted to figure out just how many immigrants have gone to America. We spent a lot of time on our calculators, adding the total numbers of immigrants for each region, and discovered that since 1880, we’ve received the most immigrants from Europe, almost 37 million! In total, we’ve had over 70 million immigrants come to America! That’s about the current population of the Congo! It was very helpful for the students to do the work themselves to get the numbers, because as they added, they started to see how big these numbers are! This showed our students that immigration is a trend in our world that is here to stay, especially now that travel has been made easier!
~ Sarah Wheeler
