Ms. Walder’s 7th grade Language Arts students came face-to-face with the Holocaust with only one degree of separation. Ms. Walder’s mother, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, spoke to the class, sharing artifacts and personal stories of her mother’s experience in Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany. While Ms. Walder’s grandmother and her grandmother’s brother were fortunate to be sent out of the country, the rest of the family perished in a concentration camp. Walder team-planned a PBL with Jen Dingle of Classflow and Dawn Bray of Discovery Ed. Students applied the Higher-Order-Thinking process by generating layered questions about the famous photograph “The Warsaw Ghetto Boy” and creating a Wonder Wall about the causes and consequences of the Holocaust. Using Classflow, students were able to immediately view, assess, and respond to each other’s insights. The driving question for the PBL soon emerged: “What responsibility do leaders have through action and word to promote the well-being of all citizens?” Students accessed curated materials for research on Board Builder, and further built their understanding of the events in a lesson with Library Media Specialist, Tiki Love, by reading the EBook, Jars of Hope, and engaging in a student-led Socratic Seminar. Students will conduct research on a leader and then present their findings on a digital platform of their choice during an open-house in April.
RSS Feed
