The Potato Famine in Ireland
A scrapbooking activity for students

The Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840’s is now recognized as the worst human disaster of 19th century Europe. In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8.5 million people. By 1850, at least one million died in terrible conditions. Another million emigrated as refugees. Ireland’s 1845 Potato Blight is often credited with launching a wave of Irish immigration to America. The fungus which decimated potato crops created a devastating famine. Starvation plagued Ireland, and within five years, a million Irish were dead while half a million had arrived in America to start a new life. In this Internet search activity you will learn more about the Potato Famine in Ireland and the Irish immigration to America. How did Americans accept the immigrants?

Instructions

Your task is to visit the Internet links below and find pictures, text, maps, facts, quotes, or controversies that capture your exploration of The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America. Be sure to include how Americans responded to Irish immigrants and the life of the Irish people in America who came at this time. You will capture the text and images that you find important and then you will put them together in a multimedia scrapbook to tell your story. Follow your interests, but be prepared to share why you chose what you did and what it means to you.

Specifically, you will:

1. Visit the Internet sites linked below.

2. Copy any text you want by dragging across the words then using the Edit - Copy command on the menu bar. (Be careful not to include big blocks of text, just tid-bits that you can tell about.) Be sure to save the URL of any page from which you take printed material so that you can cite the source on your bibliography slide.

3. Paste the Text into a PowerPoint presentation that you will prepare for your multimedia project.

4. Save images you like by copying and pasting them onto your slide or by right clicking on the image and saving it into the folder which houses your PowerPoint presentation. Be sure that you save the URL of the page from which you take images so that you can cite your sources on your bibliography slide.

5. Ask your teacher for any help you may need with capturing other items of interest.

6. You must include a bibliography slide in your PowerPoint presentation that cites the sources you use.

6. Once you have created your scrapbook, go over it carefully so that you can give clear and thoughtful reasons why you included the things you collected in your scrapbook.

Internet Sites

Natural Disasters
http://www.click2disasters.com/great_hunger/great_hunger_ch1.htm

Great Famine Commemoration Exhibit
http://www.skibbheritage.com/famine.htm

Slide Show
http://205.213.162.11/project_write/PW_2002/handouts/sampleppt/sld001.htm

Primary sources-newspaper articles
http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE/

Diary, primary sources
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famine.html

Poetry, etc.
http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE/

Memorial in Boston
http://www.boston.com/partners/famine_memorial/

Memorial
http://www.batteryparkcity.org/ihm.htm

Songs
http://ingeb.org/catei.htm

Clip art, etc.
http://www.eirefirst.com/index.html

Audio on famine
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/longview_20020402.shtml

Irish immigration to America
http://www.kinsella.org/history/histira.htm

Immigration
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/irish2.html

Animated map of settlement
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/learn/features/immig/irish_map.html

Portals to Other Links

http://www.rootsweb.com/~fianna/irish/irhist.html

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/2807/

http://www.local.ie/general/history/famine/

http://www.nationalarchives.ie/famine.html

http://www.seark.net/~sabra/potato.html

http://www.seark.net/~sabra/ireland.html

http://www.edc.org/CCT/NDL/1998/institute/stan/immlinks.html#irish

Tools

Click here for a sample scrapbook

Rubric for Grading of the Scrapbook

Teacher Reference page

References

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary lets you quickly get definitions to words. Bookmark this as a favorite site so you can get to it easily. ( http://www.m-w.com/)

Roget's Internet Thesaurus allows you to find words that have similar meanings. (http://thesaurus.reference.com/thesaurus/)

The Citation Machine helps with citing your sources for the bibliography page.
(http://www.landmark-project.com/citation_machine/index.php?mode=form&cm=9&list=nonprint)