Always a New Adventure

It has been so nice to finally have the weather feel more like spring. On Monday I went out and bought some flowers for our front. I got Gerbera Daisies of course!  Planting flowers in my yard made me think about making flowers for mother's day. Here's some paper flowers that my students made. For instructions on how to make them, click here .  We also made cards for mother's day today. They were pretty creative!  Happy Spring! 

     The past few weeks, my students have been studying the Holocaust. I decided that they were learning, but it wasn't personal enough and that's when true learning occurs. I found a book called "The Butterfly" by Patricia Palocco. It's a children's book based on the true story of a German girl whose family hid Jewish families during the Holocaust. In the end, the family tries to get the Jewish girl and her family to freedom but they don't know if they made it. Then the German girl sees a huge swarm of butterflies and knows her friend made it to freedom. After reading the book, we talked about how the butterflies symbolized freedom in the story, something that Jews didn't have.       After our discussion, I read my students the poem, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" by Pavel Friedman. It is from the book, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" which is a complication of poems from the Terezin concentration camp. It was a "model