Eight books for a class studying immigration and belonging, from a five-year-old whose name nobody says right to three children fleeing three different wars eighty years apart. You can hand a picture book to your youngest readers, a wordless graphic novel to the student who dreads a page of text, and a 350-page novel to your most fluent, and still gather the whole room around the same question: what does it take to leave one home and make another. What's in each book is set out plainly below, a border crossed, a name given up, a family split between two countries, a language lost and rebuilt, so you can plan the unit and choose the right book for the child in front of you. This page describes these books. It doesn't argue about immigration, and it won't tell your students what to think.
This is a text set for a mixed-level room: assign by reading level and readiness, or spread the whole set out and let students compare how differently the same experience gets told. The picture books each hold the subject inside one thing a young child can carry: a mother and baby crossing into a country they don't have words for yet, a girl deciding whether to trade her Korean name for one the class can pronounce, a girl who is Peruvian and Scottish and American at once being told to pick. The Arrival takes the words away entirely and puts a student inside the experience of not being able to read the world around them. The four longer books split along a line worth making visible to students: Mia Tang's family in Front Desk moved by choice and landed hard, while Ha, Jude, and the three children in Refugee were driven out. Front Desk is the funniest and most companionable. Inside Out & Back Again and Other Words for Home are both verse novels a student can finish in a few nights, one about a girl fleeing the fall of Saigon, one about a girl flown out of Syria while her father and brother stay. Refugee is the top of the set and the heaviest by a long way. Pick each book by the grade and steadiness of the student in front of you, and read the heads-up on each one first.