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Who We Are -Teaching Tips
‘Sarah and her family’ and ‘David and his family’
These presentations contain useful pointers to significant Jewish ideas and experiences. It can therefore be beneficial for pupils to engage at the outset in a close ‘reading’ of the presentations. To facilitate this, you could consider involving them in one or more of the following:
- creating family trees for both Sarah and David (though the names of some family members are not given)
- working in pairs, with one pupil ‘meeting’ Sarah and introducing her to his/her partner and the other ‘meeting’ David and introducing him to his/her partner
- completing a report template, along the lines of the one below:
The History of the Jewish Community in Britain
The language level of the text is fairly demanding but the information is brief and it offers pupils a useful second step. These learning activities work well:
- matching the immigration of the grandparents of Sarah and David to the periods presented
- discussing why the two boys (in the photo to the left of the Star of David) have both the Union Jack and the flag of Israel
- expanding this to reflect on other examples of multiple identities that your pupils or others hold
- writing one or two sentences to sum up the history of the Jewish community in Britain
Jews Across the World
An abundance of information is provided interactively on the map so that you have the opportunity to select one or a small number of countries for your pupils to home in on.
In many countries, the Jewish experience was one of persecution and pain. It’s important to be alert to the possibility that some pupils may have personal connections with one of these countries and be affected by the story told of its treatment of Jews. This will require sensitive handling and may need to be avoided, at least as part of whole-class teaching. These activities have proven to be effective:
- finding the countries from which Sarah and David’s grandparents originated and, in each case, using the information to explain why they might have come to Britain
- (as a group project) using the information given to plot some Jewish migrations on to a world map
- drawing conclusions about the dispersion of Jews and about the countries of greatest Jewish population today