Hiding in the Attic

Seventh Grade is beginning their cross-curricular reading of The Diary of Anne Frank.  In Language Arts, they are reading the novel in peer reading groups, enjoying their encounters with British phrases like “W.C.”, and laughing at Anne’s vivid descriptions of her companions in hiding. They learned some of the background of the Holocaust, as well as watching the original black-and-white movie.  In Computer class, the students used Google Earth to locate the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.  Then they took an online tour of the Secret Annex where the Frank family hid, and they used Sketch-up to make a computer model of the Annex.  After that, the students, writing from the perspective of an object in the Annex, analyzed why the object was historically significant, and what the object revealed about the life of the Frank family.  In Language Arts, the students sharpened their peer editing skills and polished their classmates’ writing from Computer Class.  All of this hard work will be followed next year in Language Arts with the reading of Pulitzer Prize winner Elie Wiesel’s novel Night and a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

Google Sketch Up design by Ginika Nwaba