Personally I do not think that this book would be suitable for students under Grade 4. My students were blown away with the concepts in this book. It was great that the final reading of the story took place on Remembrance Day – Novemebr 11th. I found an amazing website for teaching ideas to complement this book. The url is:

http://www.cdli.ca/CITE/number_the_stars.htm#Writing

Erika’s story was an excellent short story, picture book that we read to complement our reading of Number the Stars. Students have been motivated enough to search for other children’s books about the war and the Holocaust. One of my reluctant readers ran back from the library with a book about Anne Frank and told me she was going to read it for homework. What a shame the end of the school year approaches. Next time, I teach literature studies with this novel, I shall include report writing and biographies and definitely include some project work on Anne Frank.  Today we read Margaret Wild’s “Let the celebrations begin”.  It was nice to have a “happy ending”.

Please contact me via this blog’s comments section if you have some great lesson ideas for teaching about the holocaust or WWII

Louisa Guest