Description
What our Anne Frank lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Anne Frank teaches students about Anne Frank, including who she was, key events during her lifetime. The lesson includes excerpts from her famous diary. By the end of the lesson, your students will have a better understanding of not only who Anne Frank was but also the importance of her story. This lesson is for students in 4th grade, 5th grade, and 6th grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the orange box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. If you’d like an additional activity, you can have students create a timeline of Anne Frank’s life. You could also give every student a composition notebook to begin their own diary to write in each day. To make sure they’re using their notebooks, you could schedule five minutes at the end of every school day for students to write in their diary, and allow students to read through them and ask if anything surprised them about what they had written on their last day of class. Finally, you could have your students read The Diary of Anne Frank.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
ANNE FRANK LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Who is Anne Frank?
The Anne Frank lesson plan includes three content pages. Many people know the name Anne Frank from the book titled The Diary of Anne Frank. To understand who she was, you first need to learn about the Holocaust, which began in 1933 and mostly happened during World War II. It started in Germany with the persecution of the Jewish people. The Holocaust was the systematic and organized murder of around 11,000,000 people by the Nazi regime, under Adolph Hitler. 6 million of these 11 million people were Jewish people living in Europe. This was about two thirds of all the Jewish people living in Europe at this time.
Anne Frank was a 15 year old German-Jewish girl who went into hiding during the Holocaust. Anne hid to avoid the Nazis finding and capturing her during the war. She was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. She lived with her older sister, Margot, her father, Otto, and her mother, Edith. Her father’s family lived in that town for generations.
Four years later, Hitler and the Nazis gained control of Germany, and the Franks feared for their lives. Anne’s father left Germany to set up a business in the Netherlands and the rest of his family joined him a few months later.
The Franks lived in relative normality for a few years, with the children attending school. However, the situation in Europe eventually got worse and the family tried to move to England or the United States but failed. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and World War II officially began.
The Netherlands were not originally involved in the war, but the Germans invaded a year later, beginning the implementation of anti-Jewish laws and persecution against the Jews. The government did allow them to travel and Anne’s father lost his business.
The Frank family went into hiding with her father’s business partner and two employees. They began hiding in a house behind Otto’s business on July 6, 1942, when Anne’s mother received an order to report to a German work camp. Anne was only 13 years old at this time. They remained hidden in this secret place for two years.
About a month before they went into hiding, Anne received an autograph book as a present. She decided to use it as a journal and spent the next two years writing about her experience hiding.
Anne Frank’s Diary
While they were in hiding, the seven people living in the annex had to stay very quiet. They spent most of their time together. Some office workers helped them arrange to get food, clothing, and books. The only contact they had with the outside world were the helpers and a radio.
Anne wrote in her diary from the first day they went into hiding. She wrote about life in the annex, including her thoughts and feelings. Writing in her diary helped her cope with her new life. Meanwhile, the Nazis rounded up Jews to put to death in the Holocaust.
Anne also wrote short stories and wrote down her favorite sentences from other authors in a separate notebook. Time passed, and Anne heard a request on the radio for people to keep war journals. She decided to rewrite and edit her diary, calling in The Secret Annex.
After two years, they heard that the war was ending and had hope for their freedom.
Life in the Annex
They hid the door to the annex with bookshelves. The annex was small and had two floors and an attic. The first floor had a bathroom and kitchen, and the second floor had two small rooms. They used the attic for storage, but Anne sometimes went there to write alone. They covered the windows with thick black curtains. As time went on, other people moved in and it became crowded. They had to be quiet and even walk softly.
The End
Before Anne could finish rewriting her diary, the German police found and arrested her and the other people hiding on August 4, 1944. Anne was 15 years old. The police sent them to Nazi concentration camps a month after their arrest. Both Anne and her sister died from typhus, a disease, in March 1945, seven months after arriving at the Bergen-Belsen camp. The war ended on May 7, 1945 when the Germans surrendered.
We don’t know how they found Anne and the other people living in the annex. The people living in the annex left behind Anne’s diary and many other papers during the arrest. Her father survived the war, but no one else did. He learned of his wife and children’s deaths on his way back to the Netherlands.
People saved Anne’s diary and gave it to Otto. They first published the diary in 1947 with the title The Secret Annex. Later, they changed the name to Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. Five years later, in 1952, they published The Diary of Anne Frank in the United States.
ANNE FRANK LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Anne Frank lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
DIARY ENTRIES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
Students will work in pairs to complete the lesson activity. Each pair will read entries from Anne Frank’s diary and will then discuss and write down the thoughts and feelings that Anne may have had while writing. They will also answer questions about each entry.
Students can also work either alone or in larger groups for this activity if you’d prefer.
MATCHING PRACTICE WORKSHEET
For the practice worksheet, students will first match the dates or numbers with the correct event. Next, they will answer 20 questions about the lesson material.
ANNE FRANK HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment asks students to write diary entries for seven days. On each day, they should write about events, thoughts, and feelings. Students will not be required to share their diary entries.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the activity worksheet, the practice worksheet, and the homework assignment. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
