Andrea Warren is coming to TFOB in March!
When teaching middle school students, I often looked for resources that could be used to teach both CC Social Studies content standards and CC ELA fiction and non-fiction standards. Where I frequently encountered challenges was in finding texts that were accessible to a wide range of readers, from lower elementary to high school, in Lexile range.
This book does so beautifully. The Lexile is about 5-6th grade, but the content -- Jack Mandelbaum's story of surviving Hitler's systemic genocide of the Jewish people during WWII -- is for more emotionally mature readers.
I bought class copies and we listened to the audio book.
I also bought the Author's Guide and used the author's excellent essays on several topics. She provides concrete examples of how writing non-fiction is different than writing historical fiction. Her explanation of how she wrote the book, doing interviews and finding and choosing photographs, provided vital scaffolding for students. It enabled students to better understand the crafting of non-fictional texts.
I also found, online, this wonderful Student Journal. Students answered comprehension questions as they listened to the audio book in class. I printed them on special paper, with cardstock covers and a timeline of Holocaust events, and asked students to bind and turn them in with a larger, WWII unit project.
