Holocaust Remberance Week Observed

Tara Murphy teaches third and fourth grade English, language arts and reading and social studies at Fayetteville ISD. Jan. 25-29 was Holocaust Remembrance Week. The third and fourth grade students participated by reading and analyzing a poem, “The Butterfly,” by Pavel Friedmann and designed remembrance butterflies or butterflies of hope (inspired by a newsclip they watched from the Holocaust Museum in Houston). Students were able to compare and contrast the freedom and hope the image of a butterfly represents to the stark imprisonment and devastating circumstances of Jewish ghettos. Students were particularly taken with the story of Anne Frank and an image of a pile of shoes from a photograph taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During recess, the students had the idea of placing our shoes in a pile and taking a photograph around it. They discussed how each pair of shoes represents a person’s life, and how shoes can be seen as a symbol of freedom because our feet (and our shoes) take us where we want to go. We were able to talk about how the pile of shoes represented the imprisonment and loss of rights for Jews across Europe. Holocaust Week provided the ability for cross-curricular instruction as we combined learning through art, history, and poetry.