At the start of every school year, I look around my classroom in amazement at the way all 90 of my students from all different backgrounds, neighborhoods, and countries come together to share a common goal; learning. In our diverse Brooklyn school, we have students that come straight from their country into our classrooms and it is our job to do whatever it takes to ensure they are learning to the best of their ability. It is a challenging task, but our teachers are ready to face that task head on.
Our current 6th grade class has about 450 students and many of them will be traveling far distances to attend our school that emphasizes learning through technology.
With this new 6th grade class, we are not guaranteed a certain type of learner, we simply embrace the students regardless of their learning style. We are ready to tackle this task through various entry points.
My Project
As teachers, we are constantly looking for new ways to incorporate historical fiction into our lessons. With the release of R.J. Palacio's newest novel, "White Bird," it was decided that we could use this graphic novel to add the Holocaust into our historical fiction unit. Working alongside our current unit on Japanese Internment, we felt it was an excellent way to expose students to different forms of literature, as well as different perspectives of the same time period.
We would be using our new graphic novels, "White Bird," to show the students what life was like during the Holocaust by giving them exposure to a form of literature that has not been used before in our classrooms.
Pairing our new books with non-fiction texts would help prepare the students for the upcoming state exams, as well as open up doors to new genres and parts of history that have since been left unexplored. With each passing year, students seem to know less and less about the Holocaust, and it is our job, as teachers, to give them the information they never knew they always needed.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Hanley and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.