"Here isn't always the same. Sometimes it's here just for a moment."

Content Area Connections:

Language Arts: Use story details to explain why the family leaves their home and how the characters adjust to a new community. Interpret how illustrations and dialogue reveal character experiences and relationships. Reconstruct the sequence of the family’s journey using evidence from the text and images. Discuss how storytelling helps characters share their language, memories, and culture.
Social Studies: Compare life in the past to life today, explain how families provide support, construct maps of places within the story, identify ways people work together to build community, analyze historical events from different points of view, discuss how diverse cultural groups contribute to communities, examine how geography shapes peoples lives, explain movement of peoples from diverse communities, explore immigration stories to the US.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL):Consider how change, uncertainty, and hope shape the characters’ decisions (self-awareness). Examine how welcoming actions help newcomers feel included in a community (relationship skills). Discuss ways people honor language, traditions, and family stories while adapting to a new place (social awareness). Reflect on how communities support belonging. 
Art: Investigate how the illustrator uses pattern, color, and visual symbolism to represent culture and movement. Interpret how visual elements communicate shifts in place and emotion across the story. Design a symbolic “story boat” that represents important memories, languages, or traditions students would carry when moving to a new place.

Primary Source Connection: 

• StoryCorps - hear stories directly from refugees across the world 
• Refugee Act of 1980 - raised the ceiling of annual refugees into the US, provides new definition of refugee  
• Ellis Island Immigrant Oral Histories

Other Books: 

• A Different Pond by Bao Phi
• My Name is Sangoel by Karen Williams & Khadra Mohammed
• Four Feet, Two Sandals by Karen Lynn Williams
• The Journey by Francesca Sanna