January 27 was International Holocaust Memorial Day. Rather than stand up in class an talk, I wanted to do something different with my students. I wanted them to get an idea of the magnitude of 6 million people. Looking online I found the Yad Vasham Shoah database but quickly realized that even presenting it on the IWB in our classroom wouldn't reveal the enormity of this partial list of victims. The 166 page list of adults and children ranging from 1 to 78 years old contains over 2000 names. My classes and I figured it mathematically to be .03% of the total. What caught there attention the most was that the list as we presented it stretched the entire length of our wing of the building. As my students walked quietly down the hall I asked them to look for the youngest and the oldest to compare the number of adults to children and to determine why we have so much detailed information. When we returned to class we were able to have a discussion of the magnitude of the Holocaust that was appropriate to the meaning of the day.
Blogush. At the end of the unit all of the students post a historic fiction piece on our class blog as if they had lived through some part of WWII whether it was the Homefront, Europe, or the Pacific.