Our grade 3 students are looking at how migration happens as a result of challenges, risks and opportunities. one of their activities we were working on was interviewing people in Chinatown.
At first the students were hesitant, they were a little shy and they didn’t know what to expect, but it worked out much better than I had anticipated. The adults around Chinatown were really curious about what the kids were up to and many waited in line to be interviewed. We wanted students to feel confident talking to others, but also learn how to collect data with purpose. Their biggest take away was people come from everywhere.
Sometimes when ex-pat students are living in a new country we have a tendency to think everyone is either from the places we are from or a local, this showed us how blurred those lines really were and the students loved it.
After we worked on the interviews we explored some reasons why people may have moved and how things have changed in Singapore over the past 700 years, but the reasons for migration are pretty much the same. It helps tie our present situations to other’s feeling throughout history and now.
Joe Teft 