Considerations for Students with Disabilities

Differentiating instruction for students with disabilities during a sensitive and complex unit like the Holocaust requires both academic support and emotional sensitivity. The following are offered as strategies to support this:

• Use Simplified and Accessible Texts: Provide leveled reading materials, including graphic novels or simplified historical summaries, that focus on essential facts and themes.
• Provide Visual Timelines and Maps: Use visual timelines and maps to help students place events in historical and geographical context; color coding, symbols, and pictures can increase understanding.         
• Incorporate Multimedia Resources: Use videos, photos, survivor testimony clips, and virtual museum tours to make history tangible and real.
• Incorporate Graphic Organizers: Use cause-and-effect charts, Venn diagrams, or story maps to help students organize information about key events, figures, and themes.
• Pre-Teach Vocabulary and Concepts: Teach key terms (for example; ghetto, genocide, resistance) with visuals, examples, and repetition before diving into reading or discussion.
• Provide Emotional Check-Ins and Safe Spaces: Due to the intense and traumatic nature of the topic, allow time for students to process feelings, take breaks, or talk about emotions in a safe space, understanding that all students process emotions and sensitive information differently.
• Offer Choice in Assignments: Let students choose how to show understanding—draw a picture, write a letter from the perspective of a historical figure, create a short video, or build a model of a memorial-to show their understanding of the content.
• Use Social Stories or Personal Narratives: Incorporate survivor stories that humanize history; select age-appropriate and emotionally manageable excerpts to build empathy and understanding.
• Chunk Content and Use Guided Notes: Break the unit into small, digestible parts with guided notes or fill-in-the-blank formats to support focus and retention.
• Connect to Modern Themes: Help students make real-world connections—discuss fairness, acceptance, standing up to bullying, and how we remember historical events today through monuments or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
• Be Mindful of Accommodations and Supports: Ensure that students with disabilities are being given the accommodations and supports needed to ensure success, including assistive technology and any other supports to enhance student needs, especially those listed on the student’s individualized education program (IEP).