Aim: What type of life did immigrants encounter in NYC in the Gilded Age?

By: Clarissa Lynn

A lesson modeling the use of Questioning the Author in AmericanHistory

Jacob Riis (1849-1914) and the NYC Tenements • Riis immigrated to the USA in

1870, at age 21• He lived in NYC tenement

slums, and knew first-hand how bad conditions were

• Became a police reporter, then reported for various NY newspapers

• Advocated the elimination of poverty’s evils through government reforms

• Published How the Other Half Lives in 1890

Questioning Jacob Riis1. Alone, read Riis’ chapter

“Jewtown” from How the Other Half Lives

2. Pay attention to vocab definitions for each chunk

3. After reading each chunk, create 1-3 questions for Riis. You should have 4-12 questions total. Avoid yes/no questions.

4. Get in a trio (3). Discuss all your questions.

5. Select the best 3-5 questions and write them largely on a big paper.

6. Post questions on board for discussion.

Discussion

• Can we organize the questions into categories?

• Can we guess how Riis might have answered these questions?

• Are any of these questions purely from the present era? In other words, would some of these questions NOT be asked in 1890?

Questioning the Author Discussion Techniques

1. turning back : finding the answer in the text

2. recapping : summarizing major ideas

3. revoicing: paraphrasing inarticulate student responses

4. annotating: adding supplementary information that is not in the text

Practice creating your own QtA lesson

• Each teacher will get a blank text • chunk (segment) it• identify important vocabulary• create a follow-up activity to facilitate discussion,

you can use the modeled follow-up as well (other ideas: create an interview of author, written or role-played, talk show, use document in an dbq style essay, write a letter/response to the author, create a graphic organizer based on important ideas in text, etc)