At the end of our work on the project we had a great opportunity to present our websites to students and conduct an online lesson, which was an extremely capturing and useful experience. We had a feeling that we were real teachers, as we managed to establish contact with students and spark an interest in an important historical topic of the ghetto.
We used some didactic methods to encourage children and create favorable conditions to improve material comprehension. The emphasis was on interactive methods, since our goals were to tell them about Selma Meerbaum and motivate them to learn more about the poetess and the historical background which had an impact on her life.
We tried to plan our lesson so that not only we would present our project, but the students would also take an active part. Due to this reason, we started our class with a small interactive to interest students. We showed different photos of Selma's life, asking them what associations they evoke in them and whether the students know what period of Selma's life the photos belong to. After that, we conducted a survey, in other words, a quiz, to see what the students already knew about Selma. In this way, we wanted the students to get more involved in the questions they did not have the answers to, so that later on they would want to find more information on the website of our project. Such knowledge actualization helped us to foster further cooperation during the class and identify the aspects which need to be paid more attention by students.
The second part of our lesson was dedicated to Selma’s poems. We introduced students to the podcast with Petro Rychlo and discussed its aspects. Also, we were able to listen to the poems in groups and consider the role of poetry in our life. Moreover, the students had the opportunity to express themselves at the expense of their associations with Selma's poems.
The third part was about the other project related to Selma Meerbaum, namely artefacts created by our project group. First, we tried to brainstorm some ideas answering the question "What are the ways to revive literature in everyday life?" and smoothly moved on to our creative approach in the project. The pupils were very interested in it, and most of them even desired to take an active part in distributing the materials.
What also was crucial to us was their feedback and to find out the pupil's opinion on this topic, as well as our mini-project. For this reason, at the end of the lesson we asked them to give an answer to the question "What did they like most about what they learned today?" using the Menti program, and we were really happy to get a lot of nice feedbacks, such as "creative approach", "interesting information", "poetry", "created site" and so on. It definitely motivates us alongside with the students to continue working and not to stop learning something new.
