4. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
5. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
VIITIVTSI, Ukraine — The families staggered in, bleary-eyed, to a two-room kindergarten around 1 a.m., exhausted after a long journey from their home in Cherkasy, about 300 miles away. Fearful of the threat from the Russian invasion, they had decided it was time to leave, and make their way along with tens of thousands of others to the safer regions of western Ukraine.
It was slow going. The roads were jammed with Ukrainians making a similar exodus. As they settled in for a few hours of sleep on a set of cots sized for 4-year-olds, air raid sirens blared from the administrative building next door.
The next morning, as snow fell outside, 11-year-old Karolyna Tupytska and her younger sister Albina brushed their teeth, played with a small Terrier and braced themselves for another long day of travel. They were headed to Poland with their mother, Lyuba.
“My grandparents and my dad are still in Cherkasy,” Karolyna said. She said she was sad to leave behind her white hamster, Pearl.
In Ukraine, everyone who has the means is on the move, displaced by a war that seemed impossible to imagine, but has finally arrived. They are fleeing physical danger, of course — artillery attacks that ravaged hospitals, public squares and apartment buildings — but also the desperation of wartime conditions evident in food shortages, loss of work and a dearth of medical supplies.
In the past week, more than one million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations. A million more are internally displaced. Aid groups have described it as one of the biggest humanitarian crises in recent memory. The European Union said Thursday that it would offer Ukrainians temporary legal protection to live and work in the bloc for up to three years, and the United States also said it would give them temporary protected status.
At the kindergarten, Iryna Boicharenko, a 19-year-old also from Cherkasy, was sleeping in a room with her extended family. The walls were painted with Soviet-era cartoons — a wolf with an accordion, a donkey with a balalaika, and a bear in a vyshyvanka, a traditional Ukrainian costume.
“When I got in the car I started crying,” Ms. Boicharenko said. “I just started to cry because I realized I am leaving my country and running from a war. It’s an awful feeling.”
