In addition to teaching high school English, I teach – and have taught for the last 8 years – at a wonderful Hebrew School (an after-school program) in NYC. For the last few years there, I’ve taught 7th grade, and our curriculum focuses on Holocaust studies. We use the powerful Holocaust and Human Behavior curriculum designed by Facing History and Ourselves. If you don’t know Facing History, check them out!
At a Facing History workshop a few years ago, I participated in an exercise where we (a group of educators) made Holocaust memorials out of clay. I decided that this year my 7th grade students should engage in a similar project, using their knowledge of the Holocaust from our studies to create and design Holocaust memorials and present them to students and parents. My fantastic, ever-supportive boss at the Hebrew School encouraged the project and decided it should serve as the center of our school-wide observance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day (which was yesterday). And so it did!
Yesterday, my students demonstrated to our school just how amazing they are: stationed at tables around the sanctuary, they spoke to visitors – 5th/6th graders, teachers, parents, grandparents, and synagogue and Hebrew School staff – about the memorials they had designed, researched, and created over the last few weeks in class. They were so poised and excited about the opportunity to share their work and knowledge with others, and I was absolutely ecstatic to see and hear how impressed the audience was with these hard-working and creative kids!
Here are a few samples of their beautiful Holocaust memorials:
This is a memorial commemorating the families and children who perished in the death and concentration camps. The names of children who died in the Holocaust line the walls, and the group that designed this wanted to evoke feelings of sadness and destruction with the artistic elements in the memorial (the adjectives on signs, the barbed wire, the cracked and discolored clay, etc.).
This memorial commemorates those who died in the Holocaust. There are six faceless figurines, for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. This student created 3 biography packets that give information about 3 specific people who died in the Holocaust, and on the second page of each packet is a blank sheet where visitors to this memorial could (and did) write names of people they were related to or knew about who were victims in the Holocaust.
This memorial powerfully depicted the train tracks that led to Auschwitz, with luggage discarded along the sided of the tracks. This memorial commemorated the victims who were shipped to death and concentration camps via trains and lost their possessions, their families, and often their lives when they were transported to the camps.
Each student made a “Never Forget because…” poster (filling in the rest of the sentence with their own reasons why we shouldn’t forget the Holocaust), and these posters hung around the room during the exhibit.
This memorial to the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust involves a Star of David with stripes, which represent prison bars, and the star rises on an angle, representing the rise and rejuvenation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. The six candles, representing the six million, also rise from the table, and four of them are on twisted legs, which these students designed to represent the struggle that the Jews faced to find a steady footing after the Holocaust.
Aren’t my students terrific?
Tagged: Creativity, Education, history, Holocaust, middle school
