Lesson Overview:
Through online stories and photographs, students will explore what daily life was like for the millions of poor Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian immigrants living in crowded, dirty, dark, unheated, and dangerous tenement apartments at the turn of the century. Despite the harsh tenement life, most immigrants recognized the freedom and opportunity America had to offer and settled into their new lives here, creating a mosaic of rich and varied languages, religions, and cultures and making the best of their situation.
Length of Lesson:
Six 45-minute class periods
Notes:
This lesson is particularly suitable for grades 3-4.
Instructional Objectives:
Students will:
- appreciate some of the challenges and difficulties immigrant families faced living in tenement apartments.
- understand how the families' lives were shaped by the environment in which they lived.
- compare and contrast living in tenement apartments to their own living conditions.
- use reading skills and strategies to understand a variety of informational texts.
Supplies:
- Chart paper
- Markers, crayons, or colored pencils
- 6" x 8" shoe boxes (all the same size)
- A variety of cereal boxes
- Glue
- Magazines
- Wallpaper samples
- Scissors
- Notebooks
- Pencils
Instructional Plan:
Part 1: Exploring Tenement Buildings and Families
Begin this lesson by showing a picture of a tenement building. (This picture will be used again in the next part of the lesson.) Ask if anyone knows what this is a picture of. Wait for responses. Explain that "this is a special kind of building called a tenement building." The word tenement describes apartment buildings built specifically for multiple working-class families from the 1850s through 1929. Refer to the following vocabulary words:
hardship: difficulty or hardship
immigrant: someone who comes from abroad to live permanently in another country
tenement: a run-down apartment building; especially one that is crowded and in a poor part of a city
Explain that most housing up until the mid-1800s was built for individuals and single families, not large groups of families living all together. It wasn't until the 1901 Tenement Housing Act was passed that better construction of housing, as well as lighting, ventilation, and toilet facilities, were standardized and living conditions were improved. Landlords were interested in making money, not in making their tenants comfortable.
Ask the students how many of them live in an apartment. Ask if they know anyone who lives in an apartment. Then ask how apartments today differ from the tenement housing apartments they are talking about. Ask how apartments are similar to the tenements. Write the differences and similarities on chart paper.
Tell the students that they are going to have an opportunity to view and experience what living in a tenement building was like in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Inform them that they will soon visit a Web site that tells the story of a building (97 Orchard Street) and the families that lived in it. Some of the stories are sad and some happy, but all the occupants were immigrants trying to make a better life for themselves in America. Inform students that life inside tenement housing was not easy. There were many hardships that families had to endure. There was no running water within the building and no electricity; the bathroom was in the rear yard, and there were no baths or showers. (This was true of all tenement buildings built before the 1901 Tenement Housing Act. The Tenement Housing Act Web site explains the ways in which developers and landlords were then required to improve the conditions of their dwellings.) Tell the students that they are going to explore some of the families that lived in tenement buildings.
The students will view WNET's Web site on the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Click on the "Log Cabin" section to view the building located at 97 Orchard Street, New York City. There are two views of the building, one from 1870 and the other from 1915. By clicking on different floors of the building, you and the students can view the different families that lived there. After exploring the site together, give the students the questions sheet of the Tenement Family Questions and Answers Worksheet. (Note: the second page of this handout contains the answer key.) This worksheet can be worked on as a group, in pairs, individually, or as a homework assignment. There are a variety of questions that the student can find answers to by looking at and clicking on the building interiors.
Part 2: Understanding Tenement Life
Preparation
Use the picture of the tenement building printed out for Part 1.
Print out the following photos from various Web sites. (Make multiple copies to be able to give at least two different pictures to each cooperative group in your class; these will also be used in the upcoming activity, My Experience Living in a Tenement Apartment.)
Activity: My Experience Living in a Tenement Apartment
Present the picture of the tenement building, and ask the students to recall the name of this structure (tenement building). Tell students, "This building is made up of a group of rooms. What is another word for this grouping of rooms?" (apartments). Write "Tenement Apartments" on chart paper, then ask students, "Who were the people that lived in these types of apartments?" (immigrants of different cultures). Also ask them, "Where could these apartments be found?" (New York City, Lower East Side).
Read to the class from the book Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, pages 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, and 45. Or, have the students go to the following Web sites for explanations of tenement living conditions:
Students can also use the photos printed out in the Preparation section of this instructional plan to better understand the differences between their homes and the homes of early immigrants.
After reading about tenement life, ask students to tell you all of the things that they heard you say about tenement apartments (i.e., small; cramped; one room for eating, cooking, and sleeping; no windows; toilets and water faucets in the hallway that had to be shared; no refrigerators; people hung out on fire escapes and roofs in the summer heat; many people could be living in one room; no privacy; sink used to wash dishes, clothes, and children; used as a place of work). Write their answers on the chart under Tenement Apartments.
Give students a handout of an empty Venn Diagram Handout. Have students fill it in, comparing and contrasting their home to a tenement apartment. Have students share their ideas.
Divide the class into groups and provide each group with a copy of at least two different pictures of the interior tenement scenes you prepared from the sites provided earlier. Have students choose a picture and write a diary entry from the point of view of an immigrant seen in the photo. Provide students with the My Tenement Life Handout. Express to the students that they should include at least five details concerning tenement living that they have learned about and their feelings about their living conditions.
When finished writing their entries, have students share their journal entries with the class.
Option: After a student presents the journal entry, you can have a question and answer session in which the students ask the presenter questions based on the journal entry and the presenter responds as "the immigrant."
Part 3: Look Inside a Tenement
Tell the students that 97 Orchard Street, the tenement building they have been viewing and discussing, was completely boarded up from 1935 through 1987. When the building was finally opened, everything found inside was exactly as it had been left when the tenement was sealed. During the recent restoration, over 1,500 artifacts were found in the building, including kitchenware, toys, cosmetic products, documents, soda, medicinal and milk bottles, letters, newspapers, buttons, old coins, fabric scraps, etc. Many of these objects were actually found underneath the floorboards and inside mailboxes.
Have students access the "Excavation" section of WNET's Lower East Side Tenement Museum site. Here the students can look for a variety of objects found under the floorboards. Give the students a Hidden Floorboard Object Questions and Answers worksheet to describe the ten objects found. (Note: The second page of this handout contains the answer key). They can also view the different layers of wallpaper that were found at the site.
Have the students click on the "History" section of WNET's Lower East Side Tenement Museum site, which contains a variety of pictures by Arnold Eagle. There is an excellent article regarding the conditions of tenement living that the students could read. Though the article is long, especially for third graders, it is worthwhile for them to learn about tenement conditions. Click on the images that Mr. Eagle has taken and have the students discuss what they think the child in the photo is doing or thinking about. Clicking on the actual picture will enlarge it for better viewing.
In the next tour, the students will visit the same 97 Orchard Street. Have the students click on the front door to enter.
Have the class come up with a general definition of what a tenement building is. Explore with the class how they can define a tenement building in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These guidelines are important, in that they will be followed in Part 4: Building Tenement Housing.
Below are some of the features of a typical tenement structure. Point out that the dimensions are representative, but that the specific layout of rooms and apartments may have varied from building to building. Features of a typical tenement include:
- a building that has 4-6 stories.
- a number of families or tenants living together.
- each apartment has 3 rooms (the living or front room, the kitchen, and a small bedroom).
- dimensions of the rooms are as follows: living room is 11' x 12' 6", bedroom is 8' 6" square, and the kitchen is 12' x 10' square.
- no toilet/shower/bath
- bathrooms located in rear yard
- fireplace in the kitchen
- no water available inside the building
- no electricity
These guidelines should be written on chart paper or reproduced so that the student can use them when building their apartments in the next lesson.
Part 4: Building Tenement Housing
In this section, students will work in cooperative groups to build tenement housing. Using the guidelines developed in part three, each group/team should be given identical shoeboxes to use as the walls of their apartment. Groups can use the soft cardboard of cereal boxes to create their three rooms: the living room, the kitchen, and the small bedroom. Each team should receive a variety of materials in which to create their apartment. Have each team explain their model and how it recreates a tenement apartment in the early part of the 20th century. After the teams have finished creating their apartments, they can stack the apartments on top of each other to create a tenement building.
Assessment:
Refer to the Assessment Rubric to assess student performance.
Extensions:
Extension 1: Touring a Tenement
Students can view a downloaded "panoramic movie." "Tenement VR," on WNET's Lower East Side Tenement Museum site, allows the student to experience being in the apartment without really being there.
Extension 2: Creating A Tenement Mural
Each group of students receives a three-foot long piece of butcher paper and the teacher draws four large squares across it (to make windows).
In each window, students write about and draw an aspect of tenement life that they learned about. They should decide how many people live there, what the plumbing is like, what are the sleeping and eating arrangements, etc. When completed, the windows will tell a story about the tenement life of a particular family.
After the students finish the writing and drawing aspect, paper shutters can be made so that you have to open them in order to read what's behind them.
When each group has presented their floor to the class, they can put floors on top of one another to create a tenement building to be displayed in the school hallway.
Sources:
Print:
- Bode, Janet. New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens. New York: Scholastic Inc., 1991.
- Fassler, David, Coming to America: The Kids' Book about Immigration. Burlington, Vermont: Waterfront Books, 1992.
- Freedman, Russell, Immigrant Kids. New York: Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1995.
Authors:
-
Scholastic Inc.
New York, NY
