In Humanities, we read When I Was Puerto Rican, a personal story by Esmeralda Santiago that is written about the events that happened during her childhood to shape her to be the person she was writing the book. We discussed every chapter with each other as a class and in small groups to help us understand what a good story needs and to give us inspiration for the narratives that we were going to have to write. We also learned a little bit more about WWll through field trips to get familiarized with history and how we could incorporate elements of it into our writing. Our narrative prompt was how is your present affected by your past? After many drafts and critique, we took a field trip to New Americans Museum to record our narrative. We took the audio back to our classroom and turned it into podcasts with the help of the program Audacity and adding many different sound effects.
For Humanities, we went on three field trips to three different museums about WWll.
At the LA Museum of the Holocaust, we walked around the museum as out tour guide told us about the many different artifacts they had on show and shared her personal experience with her parents being Holocaust survivors. We also were able to hear a Holocaust survivor speak about life during the war. This field trip gave me a different perspective on the survivors of the Holocaust because the survivors were right in front of me. I wasn't reading about them or watching a video on them, they were real and in front of me.
When we went to the Museum of Man, we visited the RACE exhibit where we explored the science, history, and idea of race. Our tour guide asked us a lot of thought provoking questions surrounding race, ethnicity and color. I think this field trip was beneficial to me because I feel like race can be a sensitive topic and sometimes I don't know how to go about talking about it. This trip helped me find the words to express what I want to say, while still being sensitive to the topic I am dealing with.
And for our last field trip we visited the San Diego History Center and took a look at Jewish Heritage in San Diego. We learned more about how Jewish Heritage in San Diego was affected by WWll and what that meant for Jewish people at the time that were living here. Jewish Heritage is something I didn't know a lot about beforehand so it was interesting to learn more about them and their culture.