Sixth Grade Uses Experiential Learning Project to Deepen Holocaust Knowledge

Each student learns in a different way, and at Kew-Forest, we find that experiential learning helps all students to access information through different methods. In November, Ms. Enriquez’s sixth grade class read Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, a book about the Holocaust and the Danish Resistance. In order to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust era, the class visited the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side.
 
Ms. Enriquez taught the book at another school two years ago, and found that her students had a thoughtful response. She was happy to find that Kew-Forest students were equally moved by the book. “The students were eager to learn the facts and read about a young person's experience,” she said. “They were immediately engaged with the main character, since she's roughly their age and resembles many of them in terms of likes, dislikes, friend and family relationships.  They were appropriately horrified with the maltreatment by the Nazis, and hopeful with the Danish Resistance efforts.”
 
After finishing the book, the class made a visit to the Jewish Museum, which helped expand their comprehension. The Museum helped to bring the book to life, showing the students that its characters could have been any number of the people they learned about in the Museum, and that the people in the Museum were just like people they know.

They learned about the ways in which people took care of their Jewish friends by hiding them and keeping their treasures safe. They learned about people in the Resistance who stood up to the Nazis, and they saw relics and photographs from the Holocaust survivors, and watched a video about people remembering their lost loved ones.
 
“They were in awe as they couldn't believe it was real,” Ms. Enriquez said. “It's one thing to hear and read about the Holocaust—but to actually see remnants and relics of it—that took it to a whole new level. They were able to (safely) see for themselves snippets of how bad it must have been.”
 
The students wrote insightful reflections about their experience as they tried to imagine the Jews’ experience, before creating their own memorial booklets for those they loved and who have left to go to college or another country.
 
Ms. Enriquez decided to expand the reading of Number the Stars into an experiential learning project because she believes “Reading is one thing—seeing and touching are another. Combine these sensory experiences, and you have the ultimate learning and living experience. Not all students learn the same way, so all students must be accessed by appealing to all pathways to and of learning.”
 
She says that such projects help students “to realize that fiction is rooted in life, and can provide a safe way for us to experience what might otherwise be too awful to speak of or awkward to engage in.”
 
Ms. Enriquez has other experiential projects planned: a trip to the Apollo Theatre for 7th graders to deepen their understanding of the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, and a trip to the United Nations for the 8th graders to experience a platform of Malala Yousafzai's work.   
 
She is a strong believer in experiential learning, saying, “Learning is a life process that must not be contained to the classroom. Yes, I'm teaching English language and literature, but to fully understand, appreciate, and practice what we've learnt, we must see and experience it in the real world. I'm not an ivory tower kind of teacher, I'm a trench man.”