Thursday, April 18, 2013

First Crossing

First Crossing: Stories About Teen Immigrants
Edited: Donald R. Gallo


So, this book contains 10 short stories about mostly high school kids who have immigrated or are immigrating to the United States.  There’s a story about a kid from Palestine, Romania, Korea, Cambodia, and others.  It gives you a pretty well rounded group of stories.  I think my favorite one is Lines of Scrimmage which is about a Palestinian boy who wants to play football and makes friends with a Navajo boy and they go to Canyon de Chelly.  Sweet.  I thought it was interesting how the story brought up how there was racial tension between the two minorities.

Are these stories teachable?  Absolutely.  I think they are great to use in a classroom setting.  They aren’t too long and they aren’t too short.  There’s humor, there’s drama.  They are definitely relatable stories and some of them give some twists that you weren’t expecting making them different than your average immigrant story.  Some of the stories use words from the native language which is always culturally enlightening.  The vocabulary wasn’t too difficult but I am sure there were vocab teaching moments in there.  If not used in the classroom I would also recommend students to read this book independently.  Overall, a good choice.

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