The VHEC offers an array of opportunities to support online teaching and learning about the Holocaust and its important lessons for today. The following teaching resources:
- Are free of charge
- Are easily accessible for teachers and students
- Are adaptable to your specific teaching requirements
- Support educators in teaching the Holocaust by offering both content about Holocaust-related themes as well as innovative teaching strategies.
- Correspond with core competencies of 21st-century learning and the BC curriculum
- Include student worksheets and classroom activities.
See also the Online Symposium on the Holocaust and the VHEC’s Online Exhibitions.
Teachers’ Guides
Teachers’ guides complement current and past VHEC exhibitions and support classroom learning. They include pre- and post-museum visit activities, discussion questions, student readings, primary documents, glossaries, timelines and recommended resources.
Worksheets for Analyzing Primary Sources
These worksheets and specially designed for independent student inquiry and facilitate learning via primary sources from the VHEC’s archives, museum, library and testimony collection. Students can choose from hundreds of digitally available documents, objects and photographs, and use the worksheets to study their historical significance.
Lightbox
Lightbox is an online tool for exploring and sharing the VHEC’s collection of artefacts, documents, testimonies and photographs in a classroom context. Through a one-step registration, teachers and students can curate their own selection of items from the VHEC archives, museum, library and testimony holdings. Selected catalogue records can be annotated, shared and presented through a web-based slideshow, viewed on an interactive timeline or shared in a digital workspace with interactive features.
Featured, Themed and Timeline Galleries
For focused, thematic learning around the Holocaust, teachers, students and parents can take advantage of curated galleries with primary and secondary source recommendations for presentations of suggested readings, video testimonies and other records in the VHEC’s collections database.
Teaching Guidelines
This general resource contains guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust, suggestions for preparing students for Holocaust survivor outreach speakers, more than 30 frequently asked questions about the Holocaust, a timeline, a glossary, as well as recommended websites and readings.
IHRA Recommendations on Teaching & Learning About the Holocaust
These recommendations, written by a group of experts from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), are crafted to help educators with fact-based and educationally sound techniques for teaching the complex and nuanced history of the Holocaust.
Borrow for the Classroom
Discovery Kits
Discovery kits are available for four-week loan periods free of charge and are recommended for students of grades 6 to 12. The kits include reproductions of documents and artefacts from the VHEC and other collections. Students are encouraged to examine, describe and analyze the artefacts as a way to investigate issues of discrimination, segregation, hiding, resistance, as well as the aftermath of war and immigration. Learning is supported by student information cards and teachers’ guides. Pick-up and delivery or courier costs are the responsibility of the teacher.
Classroom Book Sets
Classroom book sets are chosen to engage young learners while offering insight into the authors’ experiences of the Holocaust. They are recommended for students of grades 6 to 12. Classroom book sets are available for four-week loan periods free of charge. Each set contains 30 copies of the book, and some include additional resources and readings. Pick-up, delivery, or courier costs are the responsibility of the teacher.
