Humanities
By: Samantha Ruiz, Johan Rivas, Sherlyn Acosta, and Jahnya Bocanegra
Who is Anne Frank?
Our class has been reading about a phenomenal book that revolves around the everyday life of a young girl during the holocaust. The book talks about mature content that may not be suitable for younger readers. But on the contrary, it discuss the effects of growing up and the harshness of the war. She goes through many hardships such as starvation and inner family conflict. The colossal fear of being found is such a tremendous downhill for her family and herself. The diary is so interesting, that they even have an enchanting love triangle. We highly recommend this book. The book shows how much the war has impacted many lives and rottened many memories.
Our GROUP DISCUSSIONS!
Another important thing we do as readers is to discuss many of the important situations that are occuring in the Secret Annexe. As a class, we divide ourselves into mini groups containing at least 3 people, we use high level thinking questions and we cite evidence as well to support our opinions and thoughts about the different events in anne’s diary. Click The Link!
Emotional Life & Writing Life
Anne Frank was thirteen when she wanted to become a writer but, one major thing that stopped her was the holocaust. During her time in the Secret Annex, Anne suffers from depression which has affected her in many ways. She had a shift from being free to not having hope and the war will never come to an end. Our classmates have said that Anne has a specialty in writing because she uses some outstanding vocabulary but apart from that, she also has very visual content. Since, Anne cannot live her dream while she is in the Secret Annex she writes in her Diary Called “Kitty”. Anne is such a dynamic character that will always motivate others while they are experiencing their ups and downs.
HIDING & CAMPS
Let’s just put it like this, Hitler absolutely hated the Jews. So he started the holocaust, which was the elimination of the Jewish religion. So Anne, her family, and another family they were friends of, went into hiding. Their hiding place was behind a shelf leading to a whole other secret building, which she called the secret annexe. But the reason they went into hiding, was because in this elimination Nazi’s (Hitlers Soldiers) sent jews to camps. When i say camps, i don’t mean like summer camps, i mean like real torture camps. These camps held the jews captive, basically until they died of malnutrition, or just being tortured so much. And you know what’s even more sick, is that after a while, the crematoriums that they used to burn the bodies got so filled, they just killed jews and left them in piles on the streets. These camps were far away from cities, so no one believed that this was going on. Now back to Anne, They were scared that they would get killed in these camps, or get killed by hiding in these places, so it was super risky to try to hide. But they hid for two years, and after these two years, they got caught and were sent to different camps Sadly, Anne, her sister, and mother ended up dying of malnutrition or sickness.
By Valeria Roman.
Not long ago, around the 1940’s, there was a terrible time. It was when The Nazi leader came to power. His name was Adolf Hitler. He is one of the most notorious humans to have ever existed. He was the commander of most of the killings during this time period and an anti-semite✩. He ordered Nazis to kill all of the Jewish people, and over One Million others like the disabled, the Gypsies✩, and more. This is called Genocide✩. This happened in countries that were German-occupied and Nazi Germany. Very little people survived from the ones that were taken from their homes and put into Concentration Camps✩ and Ghettos✩.
Denmark, a German-occupied country, was one very brave country, and was one of the only ones that stood up for their Jews. There were also many other heroes such as Raoul Wallenberg, Ludviga Pukas, and many more. Hitler in total killed over six million Jews. He was partly successful in his cleansing of Jewish People, and other Outsiders. This awful time that sent shivers down your spine was and still is called the Holocaust. It ended a while back, but we still learn about it so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. This is one of the key events in history that we are learning in Mrs. Strachan’s class, and it is very interesting how these criminals could pull this off without anyone stopping them.
Star (✩) explaining part
Gypsies - Members of Traveling People that survived by fortune telling and trading from place to place
Genocide - The mass killing of a group of people that was specifically targeted and planned
Anti-Semite - (form of Anti-Semitic) A person that hates the Jewish People, in example by hurting them, and by thinking bad about them
Concentration Camp - A place where the Nazis took the Jews and other “non-humans”✩ to do “work”, but usually where they ended up dying
Ghetto - A place where the Nazis took the Jews and other “non-humans”✩ to work and live. It is an enclosed sector of an area that is made just for them, but it felt more like a prison
Non-Humans - The Nazis thought that the perfect race were the aryans, which were blonde haired and blue eyed, most of the time, and they thought that whoever did not meet criteria was a non-human, so they generalized that those were the Jews, and the disabled, the Gypsies, etc. Others that were also considered were people that Hitler didn’t like.
By Christopher Fajardo.
Alexander Kimel was a holocaust survivor, he made many poems. Our sixth grade class has read 2 of his amazingly detailed poems. We learned about what some people in the holocaust experienced. The holocaust took place around 1933 and lasted until around 1945. There was also a war going on, World War II. Mostly Kimel but we read other ones too. We read about the nazis and hitler youth. We also read about the mass genocides of about 6 million Jews and 1 million others (jehovah's witnesses, homosexual, handicapped, gypsies, and whoever does not agree with the nazi party). Before the holocaust it was hard for the Jews to keep anti - semitism away from them but it was around because they lived in a nation of Christians and Catholics.
When World War I was at its end and Germany had lost. Hitler was in Germany’s army.
By Genesis Rosales.
In this Holocaust unit, we are looking more in depth about world war ll and by that I mean how many people had felt after, like some people were happy because Hitler killed so many Jews, and others were devastated, but they were and how people see the world now. We have seen a couple of examples in poems and books. The poems we have been using are written by Alexander Kimel, a Holocaust survivor. He has written many poems such as life in the ghetto, after the war and how he still has hope in good. One of my favorite poem of his is called The Creed of a Holocaust Survivor. It tells you about how he still believes that there is still good in this world even though bad has occurred, such as the holocaust.
“ I do believe, with all my heart, That God has created a beautiful world,The sun and the trees, the flowers and the bees. And the best way to serve God, is to enjoy the fruits of his labor of love” This is how Kimel sees the world. He doesn’t see the hatred and the killing, he just sees the good. This is the definition of a glass half full.
A book that we started reading is about the perspective of how death sees the holocaust. The role he plays in for the Holocaust is knowing when to take the jews off of earth. He one day was going to take a little girl, but mistaken her with another person and had gotten interested in her. So he started to follow her and see her every step. This is what we had read so far on this book and it’s very interesting already. I encourage you read this book.
By Jaydenn Lim.
In our wonderful sixth grade class, we are learning all about the holocaust in depth. For example, we are researching about heroes of the Holocaust and how they helped the innocent people who were being hunted by Nazi soldiers, survive! We are also gathering information about the Holocaust by reading class novels and watching little clips of a movie about the Nazi Youth and the events, every morning. Listening to these events in the people’s (people who experienced it) perspective, helps students as a learner, by giving us the story from both sides and to see how one opinion outweighs the other. This year, we are analysing Holocaust survivors, and one main one we are investigating is Alexander Kimel. We recently completed a rewrite in an essay form about his first poem and a mini project on his second poem. Rewriting not only gives us the knowledge we need in order to get through this year, it also shows us how we can improve our writing. We had our classmates examine our essays and told each other what was top notch and what they needed to tweak. Without these units we learn during class, students will most likely not have an idea of what the Holocaust is, at all!
By: Jorge Ceballos, Alexander Osuna, Tyler Colonna and Rihanna Colon
Greek Mythology
Greek mythology is what the ancient greeks believed in and used to explain natural events. In Greek mythology, there were 14 major gods: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, Hephaestus, Hermes, Apollo, Hera, Dionysus, Hestia, and Demeter. Even though the gods ruled over different things, like Poseidon over the sea and Hephaestus over volcanoes, most of them actually lived on Mount Olympus. However, one exception was Hades, who ruled and lived in the underworld. Hestia and Hades didn’t have thrones on Olympus, so they aren’t olympians, but Hestia did live on Olympus. Since Hades lived in the underworld, and Hestia didn’t have a throne on Olympus, they were generally not considered as olympians.
Greek Myths are a huge part of Greek Mythology. Myths are traditional stories that the people believed in, they would tell people if they did a certain thing that a god would punish you. They used them because that's what they believed in it’s like they passed it over so their kids know and then it keeps going. One example was the myth of Zeus and Kronos. Kronos had Children and swallowed them all because he thought they would overthrow him. Zeus was the only one not swallowed. His mother Rhea made Kronos swallow a rock thinking it was Zeus. Zeus grew up to eventually make his father throw up his siblings and defeat the Titans together. Greek Myths are how the Greek people explained things. For example Zeus is the God of The Sky and when there was lightning, the people thought Zeus was angry.
With all of this information being said about all these Greek Gods, we have been working on assignments that have to do with this Greek Mythology. Some of the things that we have done are our Greek Google Slides where we explain who the gods are, their myths, symbols and who they are the gods of. We have created facebook pages for Mythological creatures, made WANTED posters for a job that has been needed and we have made Resumes for some of the Gods and Goddesses. These resumes included job names related to the god/goddesses’ information and what they ruled over.
The Greek Citizens believed in these gods a lot. For example, if they did something wrong, they were scared that the gods would be mad and do something to discipline you . For example, before setting sail, fishermen and sailors would pray and make a sacrifice to Poseidon, god of the seas.
Learning about this amazing topic was amazing. We learned about the mythical characters, settings and we learned about many landscapes and places that the myths took place in. Most