Lesson #10- Primary Language Arts

Diary of Anne Frank

Ms. Hines is a fifth grade teacher who is teaching a language arts unit on autobiographies using primary sources. She plans to organize the unit around the book, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The unit will address the essential questions, “Do I make a difference? How does literature present truth and serve as a catalyst for change?”

A week prior to beginning the unit she asks each student to create diary or journal in which they describe what has happened to them that day. She tells them that they can describe events, give their feelings about the events, or use photographs or drawings. The following week she asks the students to compare their entries for a specific day. They notice that not everybody has focused on the same things or describes the same events in the same way. This activity serves as a starting point for a discussion on perspective in writing and allows Ms. Hines to introduce the genre of autobiographies. She also discusses how diaries might be different from some other kinds of autobiographies. She tells them that they will be reading a diary written by a young girl during World War II. In order to help them understand the book, she divides her students into groups and asks them to do a webquest that will give them an overview of World War II and the Holocaust. On the webquest page, created using Sunnyside LEARN, she provides links to sources that are at the appropriate age for her students. She focuses on sources, especially photographs and maps that were created during the war.

At the end of the webquest, each group creates a timeline of the events of the war using the tool xTimeline.

Ms. Hines begins exploration of Anne Frank’s diary by reading out loud the first entries written in June 1942. The class discusses these entries and the setting of the book.  Each day the students read another section of the book, discuss it in literature circles.

When the students have finished the book, Ms. Hines leads a class discussion focusing on the authenticity of the book and whether or not it portrays events accurately. She tells the class that at least three versions of the diary have been found, two by Anne, another with edits by her father. They also discuss numerous publications of the diary, its translation into other languages, and its presentation as plays, television shows, and movies. They discuss how the creation of each of these versions might affect its accuracy. They also discuss the value of primary sources in literature and in history.

Resources used in this scenario:
Anne Frank Museum and website: http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?pid=1&lid=2

Tools used in this scenario:
Visualization: xTimeline http://www.xtimeline.com/