Kudos to my ELA colleagues in a middle school who developed this appropriately rigorous text set and prompt for their 8th grade students studying the Holocaust. Together with the 6th and 7th grade teams, we analyzed several students’ written responses to this prompt. More on that in the next post 🙂

TEXTS:

Source A (entire article):

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/world/europe/holocaust-survivors-ever-dwindling-in-number-gather-at-auschwitz-for-memorial.html?_r=0

Source B (pages 9-12 only):

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002186/218631E.pdf

Source C (video and transcript)

http://www.ushmm.org/remember/days-of-remembrance/why-we-remember

PROMPT:
One of the important central ideas in the texts/video is the importance of “Remembering the Holocaust”.  Write an essay that compares and contrasts how the authors present this central idea.  You only need to compare two of the sources. Use textual evidence to support your comparisons, and you may refer to the sources by their actual titles or by Source A, Source B, and Source C.