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With final exams approaching, US history students are now starting to wrap up their curriculum. To make the upcoming unit on WWII more engaging, US history teachers decided to bring an interactive event to the students.
While WWII was incredibly destructive, people have managed to preserve important artifacts that reflect what the war was like to the common citizen. At Rock Ridge, AP world history and US history teacher Megan Adair managed to work with a former history teacher at Stone Bridge High School, who collected artifacts from this time period. The teacher, who is now a librarian, had used these artifacts to help her students learn about WWII. She now shares them through Interlibrary Loan, a program that allows teachers from around the country to access resources for their own students. “It’s so cool,” Adair said. “There are so many different topics that she has focused on collecting, and the kids have really loved it so far.”
The teacher has collected topics ranging from the Vietnam War to the Civil War and the American Revolution. When Adair asked for a WWII Homefront exhibit specifically, the teacher managed to collect what she thought the students might need. “There’s a mixture of a lot of cool things,” Adair said. “It’s a mixture of authentic materials, surplus materials that she purchased. Some are replicas. We have Einstein’s letter to Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately, they didn’t let us have the authentic [one]. The newspapers’ posts after the atomic bomb dropped. There’s a fishing kit that anybody who went down to the Pacific on their rescue lifeboats could use to fish. There are a lot of really cool things that she’s collected.”
This experience, known as the WWII Locker, was designed for students in US history. While it was only intended for US history classes, one of Adair’s AP World History students, sophomore Alexandra Takach, found out about the lesson plan Adair had. She later went to the room where the artifacts were kept to look around during her advisory period. “I’ve always really liked history, and World War II is such a big conflict,” Takach said. “There’s so many important things to it that are really interesting. My favorite [artifact] is the Dr. Suess political cartoons because I didn’t know he did that. It was really funny and I didn’t know he was into stuff like that.”
Apart from just Adair’s history classes, classes for teachers Aisha Ahmed and Sarah Bedner had the pleasure of being part of the experience. While the students were able to explore different artifacts, they still had an assignment paired up with the experience. The students had to find 8 artifacts, describe them, and find out if it was a War front or Home front artifact.
From Bedner’s class, junior Dayanna Anton found her favorite one to be the Japanese Phrase Book. “If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious, they don’t understand what they are saying to each other,” Anton said. “They could be asking for help, or they could be cursing one of them out, and you wouldn’t know. So the phrase book is really cool because it is in both English and Japanese, so the soldiers could interrogate them, or ask for help or directions, and stuff. And it’s just kind of cool that they had it back then.”
Junior Janani Kannan, a student of Ahmed, appreciated the authenticity of the experience. “I definitely didn’t know what some of these [artifacts] were before, and seeing them in person, it kind of gives you more, like it feels like the real deal,” Kannan said. “[Because] when you read about it, it’s just ‘oh, this happened,’ but seeing it [makes it feel] like it’s real.”
