My students need a class set of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne to finish out our unit on the Holocaust with an engaging historical fiction novel.
Many of the students at our school come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Approximately 90% of our school is on free and reduced lunch and more than 50% of our students are English Learners. Unfortunately, many of the families we serve have very limited resources and our students face many difficulties at home.
I believe that when students enter my classroom they need to feel safe to be themselves and take risks.
In order to accomplish this, as well as help my students reach their goals, it is important to build a relationship with each child. I have seen first hand that my students collaborate better with each other and with me once that relationship and trust has been built. The students are more confident and willing to take risks when they feel they are surrounded by those who care.
As a teacher, my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating environment. To accomplish this, I believe in promoting collaboration, hands-on activities, and project-based learning that helps to build conceptual understanding and prepare all students for real-world experiences.
My Project
Having a class set of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas would be beneficial because the students will be able to see the Holocaust through the perspective of a young boy their age. The class will read this book after experiencing and learning about the effects of the Holocaust through informational texts, "museum" gallery walks, poems, art, and more.
The book is the focal point of this unit on the Holocaust.
This book has many themes for students to explore and defend from friendship to ignorance. To tie the novel into the Common Core Standards, students will be making meaningful inferences, comparing multiple characters, analyzing the structure of the text, quoting the text, and much more. As the class progresses through the book, students will rely on the background knowledge they had gained at the beginning of the unit to make connections. At the end of reading the book students will create AVID 1-pagers to display their comprehension of the text.
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