Teachers TV: Teaching About the Holocaust Timeline

A KS3 history lesson on good practice in teaching and learning about the Holocaust.

Sarah Hall at the Blue Coat School, Oldham adopts a timeline to contextualise the Holocaust. With her Year 9 class she introduces some of the skills that her students will need to piece the chronology together: thinking, teamwork, communication. She then outlines individual stories from different groups of people persecuted in the Holocaust: Roma, Sinti, gay people, resisters and Jews. These are set into context using the timeline. Students are encouraged to discuss the meaning of the term ‘genocide’. They are given information about when and how many of these different types of people were under attack from the Nazis. The pupils gradually fill the timeline board with various information cards, and as the lesson progresses the wider picture emerges, as does the magnitude of persecution of different groups.