Over the past three years, the Plett Foundation has published four books in its “Mennonite History for Young People” (MHFYP) series: Leaving Canada, Discovering Mexico, Living in Mexico, and Leaving Russia. These books present Mennonite history in an easily digestible format that allow readers to explore how Mennonites migrated to new lands in Canada and Mexico and adapted to their surroundings. Students at Mornington Central Public School in Newton, Ontario have started using these books as part of their history, geography, and language curriculum. This specific school has a significant population of Low German speaking students and David Martin Mennonites. One teacher at this school, Jennifer Kelly, recently wrote to the Plett Foundation about how she has been using these books to bridge together Mennonite children from different backgrounds in her elementary classroom. As one her students notes: “It is entertaining to learn how The Old Colony people immigrated [sic] from Canada to Mexico. It is very interesting because I can relate to significant things like the Old Colony language is similar to David Martin Mennonite language. Another thing that I could relate to was that the Old Colony almost live the same as the David Martin people do. The old colony people live on farms and the David Martin live on farms too.”

The “Mennonite History for Young People” series has not only helped understanding between students from different Mennonite backgrounds in Ms. Kelly’s class. She observed that many of her students went home after school to engage in a conversation with their parents about their own family’s history. As Ms. Kelly writes: “Students have been asking me daily to take these resources home to share with their families because their parents have connections to some of the people in the books, therefore making the information we are learning real, relevant and intriguing.” The lessons the children learn in school about their own history have inspired inter-generational conversation and a shared curiosity about the past.

The prologue to Leaving Canada begins with a quote from Ältester Isaak M. Dyck, who supported the migration to Mexico. He said, “Das Leben ist ein Wanderstab” or “Life is a walking stick.” As a creative learning exercise for the students, Ms. Kelly had the children learn about metaphors by following Ältester Dyck’s example. The students, inspired by their community’s cultural context and their own family’s experiences, created their own metaphors for life, completing the sentence “Life is….” Some of the children’s responses from this exercise include: “Life is chores, because chores are hard work to do and we have to do it so the animals stay alive and we stay alive” and “Life is milking a cow because we need the milk to survive so we treat the cow nice so the cow treats us nice.”

When the Plett Foundation embarked on the ambitious project of creating a curriculum that would appeal to young people and teach them about their own Old Colony Mennonite past, we hoped that the books would engage young minds but also encourage a curiosity about history in the lives of the adults around them. The four volumes of the MHFYP series and the creative and insightful ways that students have adapted this metaphor to their own lives shows the significance of the past for communicating values and beliefs for future generations.