How to teach ... migration

Nearly every family in the UK is descended from migrants. Find out more on the Guardian Teacher Network this week.

Children arriving at St Pancras station in 1951 to start their journey to New Zealand under a child migration scheme. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

The history of migration to and from the UK is as old as British history. As Barbara Roche, former Labour immigration minister and leader of the Migration Museum Project, puts it, "We are all migrants. If you want to celebrate Britain you have to celebrate migration."

Even children who see themselves as 100% English, Welsh, Scottish or British are likely to have ancestors who were Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Flemish, Plantagenets from Anjou, or from Germany in the 17th century or Italians, Armenians and Black Africans in the 19th century. Today around 11.5% of the UK population was born overseas.

On the Guardian Teacher Network, our new resources website, you can find a series of primary lesson ideas to stimulate ideas on migration. The resources were produced by the Migration Museum Project, which is seeking to create Britain's first Migration Museum.

In a series of activities that fit with the citizenship, history and English curriculum, children are encouraged to explore why people migrate and given the tools to make a class migration map and local history project. What would children take and leave if they were migrating to another country?

The teaching ideas include poignant case studies, from the story of a young man who left Scotland in the 1860s for Canada to the moving story of Sado, who was just eight when she fled from Somalia to London in the early 1990s.

You can find the primary resources and also a lesson on migration for 14- to 16-year-olds here  

Children who explore the resources will discover that every family in the UK has their own migration story. The Migration Museum Project is asking schools and families to enter the 100 Images of Migration competition, which they are running in connection with the Guardian. The competition asks people to turn these migration stories into pictures. Entries can be paintings, collages, photographs of objects or people or anything else. Winning pictures will be printed in the Guardian's Weekend Magazine.

The Migration Museum Project website is full of moving stories and images as well more as information about the competition and the proposal to create this new museum.

Source: The Guardian