The Welcoming a Newcomer lesson plan from the Critical Thinking Consortium, based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is designed to help students think about difficulties that newcomers to their community may face, and to propose solutions that fit with these challenges, so that they can take actions that will help newcomers feel welcome.

This lesson includes 3 sessions: a) matching familiar problem situations with relevant solutions, b) comparing own first-day experiences with those of the Soussan, a girl from Lebanon in Robert Munsch’s book From Far Away, and c) generating and choosing best responses to a real-life difficulty.

The Critical Thinking Consortium is an organization that works with educators to support and advocate for integrating critical, creative and collaborative thinking as an educational goal and a method of teaching and learning.