Conduct a follow-up whole-class discussion, asking students to use their notes to explain what they think the experience of migration is.When they are finished follow the same procedure again, for the second tableaux. Follow this procedure for all the groups. The first group will present their first tableau as the non-presenting students watch and take notes about what they see in the positioning and gestures the group used.

Objective: Students will create tableaux about the possible causes and outcomes of migration at a group and individual level. Can you think of any migrations happening now? Why do you think they are happening?.Did your family or your ancestors migrate from one place to another? Why?.Do other beings in nature migrate? Why?.(Remind your students that migrations can occur over long or short distances, across borders or not.) The groups should discuss the following questions.The recorder will write down the ideas expressed by the group. One student in each group will be the recorder. Ask your students to get into small groups of no more than four people.Objective: Students will discuss the meaning of the word migration and cite examples of migrations about which they know something. This lesson is an adaptation of an original lesson by the Academy of American Poets Educator in Residence, Madeleine Fuchs Holzer. This lesson can be adapted for secondary students in grades 6–12. Feel free to adjust each activity to meet the needs of your particular students. This lesson plan provides a sequence of activities that you can use with your students before, during, and after reading “The Great Migration.” Use the whole sequence, or any of the activities, to help your diverse learners enter, experience, and explore the meaning of the poem. The following sequence of activities is designed to help students think about the associations with migration that Minnie Bruce Pratt brings to mind in her poem. Pratt’s poem helps illustrate this ebb and flow. In the end, Pratt’s speaker offers a small gesture of kindness to someone “she’d never have known back home.” Migrations within-and to and from-the United States are a part of our common heritage. It, therefore, seems surprising that the first stanza of her poem contains a question in Spanish, “ De donde eres tu?” Where are you from? In this way, Pratt begins associations to other migrations-from Guatemala and Chile to the United States-and by connection, to those migrations anywhere people go in search of better lives. By calling her poem “The Great Migration,” Minnie Bruce Pratt immediately brings to mind the period of 1900–1970, when millions of African Americans left the South to seek work and better lives in the North.

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