Things we have covered in class lately

In class lately we have been talking about the turn of the century. We have also had projects based on the turn of the century such as making advertising posters for people to go west, and we made songs out of the information from the chapters we have been covering, and the project that we are recently working on is making a children's book from the events from the turn of the century. The turn of the century consisted of many things such as new inventions, electricity, industrialization and big business growth.
One inventor was named Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor of his time. He invented many things on his time such as the light bulb, phonograph and central power. With Thomas Edison there also came the westing house which generated power to homes. With this electricity brought hot irons, stoves, refrigerators, and vacuums. The electricity also made it more efficiant for factories to work later and get more accomplished.
In this time there was a lot of migration. Everyone wanted to come to America for their own reasons. Some wanted better living conditions by having a clean home or jobs to make more money or even to get away from the war in their country. All immigrants had to go to Ellis Island before they could get into the United States. Later on there was to many immigrants coming into America, which made Americans mad. Americans soon started making life harder for the average immigrant. They did this by making them pay to get in the country, making them go through inspection for diseases, or not even accepting them at all.
Through the years of immigrants being aloud in the country it made it easier and also harder. It was easier because the immigrants did all the work that americans didn't want to do. Also they worked much cheaper than Americans did. Lots of immigrants were found working in textile factories and factories that were poorly constructed and very dangerous. Immigrants even let their children work in these harsh enviornments to make money for their families. Immigrants also made life harder by moving into the cities and making them overpopulated. There was also crime and much violence comitted around where these immigrants were living. Some immigrants banded together against americans, usually teenage boys, to fight the racism of being an immigrant and being rebelious.
For my childrens book, I made a book about an immigrant named Lenny. Lenny is a man in his twenties just trying to make a better life for himself by moving to America. Although Lenny doesnt move to the city, he moves west. He reads a poster that has all the perks of moving west and thinks it will be very easy. This shows a journey of Lenny moving along America to the west in such of a better life. It tells about the things he had to do to prepare for moving and it shows the hardship that he had to go through. Even when he gets to the west, it still doesn't get any easier. The moral of the story is that "the grass isn't always greener on the other side".