The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

This book was used in my Standards Aligned Literature Grouping which can be found in its entirety in another blog post.

Fiction Book

Boyne, John. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. David Fickling Books, 2006.

Lexile: 1000L

Grades: 6-8

Topics/Tags: Historical fiction, Holocaust, Concentration camps, World War II

Summary: Bruno, a nine-year old German boy, moves to a new house after his father has received a promotion. The house is far away and there is no one for Bruno to play with. There is a tall fence running alongside the house as far as the eye can see. While exploring one day, Bruno meets a boy on the other side of the fence - a boy in striped pajamas. This boy’s life is very different from Bruno’s and their friendship has devastating consequences.

Alignment:

Learning Standards:

• Grades 5-8 Common Core Reading Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies (NYS)
• Key Ideas and Details

1. Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources.

• Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

7.    Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos, or maps) with other information in print and digital texts.

• Common Core English Language Arts Standards Grades 6-12
• Responding to Literature

11.   Respond to literature by employing knowledge of literary language, textual features, and forms to read and comprehend, reflect upon, and interpret literary texts from a variety of genres and a wide spectrum of American and world cultures.

• AASL Standards For The 21st-Century Learner
• 1.1.6 Read, view, and listen for information presented in any format (e.g., textual, visual, media, digital) in order to make inferences and gather meaning.
• 1.1.7 Make sense of information gathered from diverse sources by identifying misconceptions, main and supporting ideas, conflicting information, an point of view or bias.

Learning Goals:

• Learners will be introduced to life for children during the Holocaust.
• Learners will read, view, and listen for information gathered from fiction and nonfiction texts, including primary sources.
• Learners will make sense of information gathered to create a diary entry.

Learning Objectives:

1. Cognitive
• Students will assess and analyze documents (both primary/secondary and fiction/nonfiction).
• Students will understand the living conditions of children during the Holocaust.
2. Affective
• Using primary source documents, such as diary entries, students will be able to describe and understand the living conditions of children during the Holocaust.
• Photographs and primary source documents will help teach students the horrors of the Holocaust for children around their age. Students will react to these sources during class and small group discussions.
3. Psychomotor
• Students will write a diary entry from the point of view of a child living during the Holocaust using information gathered from nonfiction and fiction texts.

Learning Outcomes:

Learners will be able to:

• Articulate specific details about life during the Holocaust for children.
• Gather and use information from fiction and nonfiction text to write a diary entry from the point of view of a child living during the Holocaust.

Activity:

What will children be doing? What activities will they engage in to meet the Standards, Goals, Objectives, and Outcomes?

• Multi-day activities. Students will first read fiction text.
• After reading text, they will manipulate the nonfiction text to find supporting factual information for the fiction text - which historical details of the fiction text are true/false.
• The students will complete station work on the Holocaust - mimicking the Holocaust Memorial Museum. They will receive a passport of a child around their age (12-15) and follow their child’s passport around the stations, answering questions about the child (ghettos, concentration camps, liberation, resistance). The stations and passports will relate back to the texts, both fiction and nonfiction.
• Students will write their own journal entries from the point of view of a child in Europe during the Holocaust.
• This can be from the point of view of a child living in a ghetto, concentration camp, in hiding, or a part of a resistance movement.