I created this slideshow and shared it with my colleagues who are also teaching ninth grade. I wanted to move from New York, where people first felt the crash, across the country and out West in a manner that would show how many people came to be migrant farmworkers in the Salinas Valley. This was important to me because I remember reading Of Mice and Men in seventh or eighth grade without really understanding the context. I knew about the Great Depression from my grandparents, but they were New Yorkers. I had no idea what the effects were for people in farm country. My mother had read Lois Lenski books like Strawberry Girl and Judy's Journey, novels which depicted the lives of migrant farm children. Still I never connected the events my grandparents lived through with the time period in those books or in Of Mice and Men.