These lessons are intended to supplement study of past and present immigration trends in the history of your own community, in Massachusetts and the United States as a whole. The lessons can be taught in succession or the first lesson can be used to begin a unit on immigration and the second can be used later to explore more current immigration trends. Students will use graphs and maps to better understand immigration data, and they will also learn some basic graph reading skills to help them break down the information. We encourage educators to think about the idea of scale in these lessons, just as we do with maps. Consider the larger story of immigration to the U.S. as a whole, then compare to what we see in Massachusetts and then narrow down to your own community using the interactive map.