Virginia SOL USII.3.g
The Standard
explaining how various groups worked to alleviate the issues facing new immigrants and how immigrants advocated for themselves
Virginia Standards of Learning for History and Social Science
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students connect crowded housing, dangerous jobs, language barriers, and discrimination with responses from settlement houses, charities, and political machines. They also explain how immigrants used mutual aid societies, unions, newspapers, and neighborhood groups to press for help and rights.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Given a short source or scenario, students identify the immigrant need, the group responding, and the action taken. They distinguish outside assistance from immigrant-led action and explain one benefit or limit of the response.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may describe immigrants only as people receiving help, rather than organizers who created their own groups. They may treat political machines as charities and miss that aid was often exchanged for votes. They may assume settlement houses solved every problem, overlooking limits and pressure to assimilate.
How to Assess It
- Exit ticket: Choose one problem faced by immigrants. Name one outside group and one immigrant-led response that addressed it, then explain how each helped.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs source cards about settlement houses, political machines, labor unions, and mutual aid societies, then have them match each group to immigrant needs.
Ask students to write: Which form of help gave immigrants the most control over their own lives, and what evidence supports your choice?
Play a team relay where students draw a challenge card, name a fitting response, and explain whether immigrants led that response.
Compare a historical settlement house flyer with a local newcomer services webpage, then list one shared service and one major difference.
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Related Standards
- USII.3.d
explaining the events, factors, and motivations that caused individuals and groups to migrate to the United States towards the end of the 19th century
- USII.3.c
evaluating and explaining the impact of the Progressive Movement on child labor, working conditions, the rise of organized labor, support for eugenics as a soci...
- USII.3.f
explaining how governmental actions, including, but not limited to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, caused harm to Chinese Americans and other immigrants
- CE.6.e
examining the process and importance of immigration policies at different points in U.S. history; and
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