Why not tell your class about Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager whose family hid from the Nazis for more than 2 years during World War II before being found? Had she not died in a concentration camp when she was only 15, Anne might be celebrating her 80th birthday on June 12th.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tiseb/
Anne wrote a diary about her experiences, which was kept safe by Miep Gies, one of the people who helped to hide the Frank family. In February this year Miep Gies celebrated her 100th birthday. You can read extracts from Anne’s diary here.
You can find resources about World War II by choosing Question Paths History KS2 from the contents menu and looking in the folder WWII: The Blitz and Evacuation. The Night Shelter animation describes the experiences of a boy in England who has to leave his home and family. The supporting print activity asks children to write a diary entry from the boy’s point of view.
For more information about life in Britain during the war, try the interactive activity Talking Book: Turn That Light Out! in the same folder.
You’ll also find a video, letters recounting evacuees’ experiences and related writing tasks in the module Writing letters in role, in Essential Literacy KS2, Year 3, Non-fiction.
Ask your class whether they can think of any other diarists who have recorded important or frightening events. The module Thinking and writing in role: Diaries in Essential Literacy KS2, Year 6, Non-fiction contains activities about Samuel Pepys’s diary. Discuss the reasons Pepys and Anne Frank might have had for writing down what happened.
Filed under: News | Tagged: Anne Frank, anniversary, birthday, blitz, concentration camp, diary, English, evacuate, history, Jewish, KS2, Nazi, Pepys, World War II, writing letters, WWII, year 3, Year 6
