US Holocaust Memorial Museum educators and historians created these lesson plans for use in secondary classrooms. Click on a lesson plan to see its recommended grade level, subjects covered, and time required to complete. To explore lessons organized by theme, visit Teaching Materials by Topic.
This guide works with all types of Holocaust literature and pairs with any book. A universal guide designed to support the reading of any genre of Holocaust literature, it complements existing English lesson plans for any book or functions as a stand-alone framework. The guide to Holocaust literature places texts in historical context, encouraging students to understand how and why the Holocaust happened.
By focusing on how Spanish-language newspapers in Texas, California, and Puerto Rico reported on the voyage of the St. Louis, students will connect Holocaust history to American history and develop primary and secondary source reading and analysis skills in Spanish.
Students will examine Holocaust survivor testimonies as both personal memories and as deliberately-created historical records, and will evaluate how the Holocaust affected the lives of individuals, as well as the role of memory in our understanding of history.
In order to better understand what Jewish cultural and communal life was like in Europe before World War II, students search the Museum’s digital archive collections, select photographs depicting pre-war Jewish life in Europe, analyze them, and research the town(s) where the photos were taken.
Organized around a Museum-produced 38-minute Documentary, The Path to Nazi Genocide, these discussion questions provide students with an introduction to the history of the Holocaust.
This one-day lesson provides an introduction to the Holocaust by defining the term and highlighting the story of one Holocaust survivor, Gerda Weissmann.
This lesson is designed as both a two-day and four-day unit. In both versions, students analyze how and why the Nazis and their collaborators persecuted and murdered Jews as well as other people targeted in the era of the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945.
This lesson focuses on the history of antisemitism and its role in the Holocaust to better understand how prejudice and hate speech can contribute to violence, mass atrocity, and genocide. Learning about the origins of hatred and prejudice encourages students to think critically about antisemitism today.
This lesson is structured around a multi-layered wall timeline that encourages critical thinking about the relationship between Nazi policy, World War II, historical events, and individual experiences during the Holocaust.
Explore lesson plans and training materials organized by theme to use in your classroom.
