Welcome to a PLP podcast… oops I meant blog but the podcast we did create is pretty awesome and you should check it out. You can find it here:

Actually before you go listen to it why don’t I tell you how and why we’ve made a podcast. I am in grade 10 social studies so of course we are learning about WWII. But PLP is no normal program so we started working towards creating a podcast. To do this we had to learn about WWII, and this is so easy thing to do because it was such a big event.  As always we had a driving question : How might we use stories to better understand the consequences of WWII?

Our journey starts by reading a book, we were put into groups and we picked books. I read “The Cage” by Ruth Sender.

This book follows the life of a Jewish girl in WWII and her battle with life, death, war and hope. The book reminded me of Anne Franks diary.”The Cage” was a great staring point for my WWII knowledge. It talked about the invasion of Poland, Auschwitz’s and concentration camps and the everyday battle of just surviving the war. After reading this book I became very interested in Auschwitz’s and the camps. I’ve been interested in it since I was young and kinda rediscovered my interest in the topic. When I was doing my research I learnt about the awful experiments that went on in Auschwitz’s. The nazis treated these people like animals like lab rats. Reading about it is absolutely heartbreaking especially since a lot of these experiments were done on children. Actually there was one doctor in particular named Josef Mengele who had a special interest in identical twins.he killed thousands of innocent kids in his experiments. He believed the secret to replicating the DNA of a pure aryan person was found in the genes of identical twins. I did more research on this topic and decided to do my podcast about it. But this isn’t all I learnt about, I feel like an information sponge lately. We, as a class, learnt a shorten version of the complete history of WWII with much help from this video and the amount of notes I now have about WWII in my zettlekasten is incredible. The video that stuck with me most was one that showed the number of deaths in the war through a visual representation. It is called The Fallen of WWII .What shocked me is how many civilian lives were lost. When watching movies and hearing stories usually you hear the stories of the hero but I never realized how many innocent people were killed through the ripples of the war. 

As well as all this information I learned the importance of storytelling and how it can make a huge difference on how people view history. Personally hearing the stories of real people who lived lives during these horrific times makes the emotional connection to the story. Personally just seeing the facts on a diagram or reading in a textbook about the dates and deaths does’nt make me interested or care about the topic. But through knowing that each number in the statistic is someone who had a family or at least had people who loved them makes it all so much more real. For me this is what makes reading these stories and retelling parts of peoples lives through these podcasts taught me more then I thought I would, because I connected the history to real stories. Until next blog..