Food for thought about Migration

Today we were extremely fortunate in Grade 5 to have a visitor. Kristin Dadey, who is the mother of Katie in Miss Emily's class came in to talk to the children. Kristin works for the International Organisation for Migration. Kristin talked to the children about the work that the organisation do and showed an extremely thought provoking video about human trafficking in Cambodia.

The children had lots of questions for Kirstin, and what has become clear is that, as a Grade, the children are bringing a huge amount of background knowledge to this subject, which we are slowly beginning to build on.

Some of the big understandings that we took away from today were:

• Migration is the movement of people.
• Most migration is undertaken for positive reasons - jobs, education etc.
• Some migration is forced for various reasons.
• Human trafficking is one form of forced migration.
• All countries have problems with human trafficking.
• We can begin to solve the problem by raising awareness of it.

Alongside the talk today, the children have been involved in lively discussions about migration which have been driven by a number of migration stories that we have been reading in class, including the highly thought provoking "My Dog" about a child forced to migrate during the Balkans war in the early 1990s.

We will continue to explore the concept of migration through the remainder of this week and ask the children to begin thinking about a particular area that interests them that they would like to inquire into.