Dressed in Norwegian attire and assuming the role of a group of sisters and their mother arriving in the United States from Norway to be reunited with their father, Elinor recalled how her great-grandmother, Ester Torgerson, born in 1911, entered the United States from Norway through Ellis Island.

Playing the part of an Ellis Island official, Molly Mitchell wore a jacket with a red rose in its lapel, something she had been told her great-grandfather, Emile F. Coulon, always did. Born in France, Coulon immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island.

"He was always optimistic, always happy," Molly said, recalling stories she had heard about her great-grandfather.

Other students created characters from studies of immigrants' experiences. Entering Fireweed through the school's doors was for the day the same as stepping off the ship bringing them to this country and beginning their American experience. Carrying suitcases or bags containing a few carefully selected belongings, dressed in costume to reflect their country of origin and speaking with the appropriate accent, the immigrants-for-a-day were greeted by Thor Heyerman (Jimmy Kraszeski) of Scandinavian descent who checked their names against a ship's roster and issued each one a matching name tag. Stowaways were destined to return to the "ship." Others moved to the next step in a nine-step process that eventually led to each one taking a loyalty oath.

Numerous walks of life, family stories and homelands were represented. Italian storekeepers. German musicians. Greek fishermen. A Russian tailor traveling with his father. Hard-working Russian sisters looking for jobs in childcare or housekeeping. Norwegian teachers.

They told stories of a rough Atlantic crossing on a crowded ship, which served "horrible" food. They answered questions about their health, their background, their education and training, their family lives, each youngster staying true to character. They spoke of reasons for leaving their homelands, of family members left behind and ones they hoped to connect with in the United States. Some spoke of the loneliness of having no family for support.

As students shuffled from one station to the next, stood in lines, waited their turns and were required to answer numerous inquiries, one student looked at Fine and said, "This is confusing."

"And that's what it was like on Ellis Island," Fine said, understanding from the students' reactions that they were getting a glimpse of what it was like for the millions of travelers that passed through Ellis Island from the time it opened in 1892 until it closed in 1954.

"I realized that when you do an immersion experience like this, there's a quality of learning that's so much more personal that it takes on greater meaning," Fine said. "If you're trying to understand the immigrant experience, you can't recreate it exactly, but by going through this, you could see on the kids' faces the frustration, exhaustion, anger. They were able to feel some of the experience at a mild level of what it could have been like."

Once through the screening process and taking a loyalty oath, the young immigrants were officially welcomed to the United States, offered an opportunity to write a post card to family left behind and exchange their money for American dollars and cents.

"A curious thing happened as the kids came in," Fine said. "Some of them gathered around their suitcases and belongings and before long blankets were spread, people had their teapots out, kids were playing fiddles, family photos were brought out and shared. It was really alive like the streets in New York."

The day wrapped up with selected readings about the experience of actual immigrants and the sharing of poetry found on barracks walls on Angel Island, where quarantine and immigration stations were located in California for almost 10 years beginning in the mid-1800s. That was followed by singing of songs selected especially for the event, such as Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and Peter, Paul and Mary's "If I Had a Hammer."

"And then we ate lunch, a roots and shoots potluck to celebrate the end of the unit," Fine said.

"We spread out on the 'streets of New York' and had lunch."

McKibben Jackinsky can be reached at mckibben.jackinsky.@homernews.com.