Of 'Night' and Earth Day
By AUBRIE GEORGE
The Cherry Hill Sun
5/30/2009

In the vast art studio at Beck Middle School, eighth-grade students took visitors through a museum exhibit they created to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, Earth Day and National Poetry Month – all at once.

The students built “poetic memorials,” working through the month of April to construct four-piece exhibits using themes of resiliency and human nature.

The exhibits focused on the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel – a story based on the author’s experience as a young Orthodox Jew who was sent with his family to the German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the World War II.

“This is really a dark, heavy topic,” said eighth-grade language arts teacher Mandy Baker, who organized the project. “And this was a good way to really break it down and show respect for it.”

All of the students started out by writing poems incorporating words from “Night,” which they used to create a symbolic structure – that was made completely out of recyclable materials, Baker said.

Baker said that each student was asked to sign up for one of four groups – the literary group was charged with editing and publishing the poems students had submitted, the construction group was in charge of building the exhibits, the aesthetics group put the finishing touches on the visual and artistic aspects of the exhibits, and a fourth group completed audio-visual installments that accompanied each exhibit.

Students made all of the exhibits out of recyclable material they brought in and collected including bottles, cans, boxes, newspapers and tissue paper.

In one exhibit, gallows were made out of recycled cans, bottles and boxes, poems hung from the ceiling backed in red paper to symbolize blood and obituaries were clipped from local newspapers and strewn on the bottom of the exhibit. Students also used plastic bottles and newspaper to build a barbed wire fence.

Each exhibit was accompanied by an audio-visual project that featured the students reading their poems as different images flashed across a screen.

At a fourth exhibit, students expressed how despair could turn into hope and eventually resiliency by constructing a tree out of plastic bottles, newspaper, tissue paper and boxes. The bottom of the tree incorporated poems and messages that centered on suffering and despair but as the tree grows upward, the message transforms to those of hope.

Eighth-grader Nikita Shuklu said she chose words from the novel that meant something to her and she called the project “enjoyable.”

“It was so much fun, because it was our own creative expression.”

eighth-grader Sara Nussbaum said.

The memorials remain on display as students begin reading in book clubs about oppression, holocaust, and genocide in order to compare and contrast the topics for literary essays they will eventually write.