This unit is all about World War II we learned about the whole war but the novel study we did focused on the holocaust. The driving question was: How can Stories of survival deepen our understandings of WWII? So the question was how can our novel studies about the holocaust help us learn more about WWII.

One of the concepts we learned about was cause and consequence which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s looking at what causes an event and what the consequences of that event to help us better understand what happened. For example the Treaty of Versailles caused extreme poverty in Germany making it easier fo Hitler to gain control. Of course it’s not as simple as that but you get the idea.

For this unit the main project was making book trailers for our novel study. My group for this project was Izzy, Ruby, Kiyaan and myself you can check out there thoughts on this project on their blogs. The book we were given was a graphic novel called Maus by: Art Spiegelman which is a book about his father’s experience in WWII and the holocaust. First we read though the books and talked about them as a group each week and completing role sheets.

Once we had a good understanding the book we started to brainstorm for our trailer here is the original brainstorm:

After we’d figured out what we wanted to do for our trailer we wrote a screenplay so we would knew exactly what was happening:

Then we made a Storyboard so that we had a visual idea of what it would look like as well as a call sheet so should knew exactly where and when we would be doing everything:

After all that and many drafts this was our final product:

This project and the books we read were a really insightful and interesting look into WWII and the holocaust and why we have to keep sharing these stories. Our book was especially interesting because it was a graphic novel so it was a very visual story and that helped us learn and connect with it even more.