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How to Teach The Diary of Anne Frank

Teaching The Diary of Anne Frank can be a little overwhelming for middle school and high teachers. First, there are many sensitive topics within the text. Secondly, teachers want to be empathetic to those students who are delicate and can be affected by traumatic topics. Teachers want to teach the time period and the story to the best of their ability. Simultaneous they want to evoke and show empathy and understanding. For me, the month of May is teaching The Diary of Anne Frank. This is one of my favorite units, not only because of the diary, because I get to teach empathy, perspective, and “walking in someone else’s shoes”.

How I Teach the Diary & The Time Period

Because of the timing and many interruptions in May, I teach through many medias and excerpts from Anne’s diary. I incorporate poems, videos, Power Point presentations, pictures, and other pieces to give my students the full effect of the diary.

DAY # 1-I start off with the an Anticipation Guide which asks students to share their opinions on general statements. For example, students have to agree, disagree or neutral a statement like, “A leader should be kind, gentle, and understanding.” The students then have to support their claim with their own opinions and feelings. Check out my free anticipation guide:

The Diary of Anne Frank-Anticipation Guide

DAY 2 & 3-After the Anticipation Guide, I teach the students about stereotypes, racism, prejudices, and discrimination. I begin by reading the allegory, The Terrible Things with the students. We then compare it to the poem, “First They Came for the Jews”. Following, we speak about what happens if one does not speak out, and discuss common stereotypes that are used on a daily basis and how dangerous they can be to a specific group. I also clarify the definition of racism and prejudice with them.

DAY 4, 5, & 6-I show students the documentary by Steven Spielberg called, The Last Days. The Last Days is about five Hungarian Jews who survive concentration camps, and they talk about their eye-witness accounts about the last days of the war. This is a phenomenal piece, and it truly gives the students the perspective of a Jewish person during WWII.

DAY 7-I hand out the 20-page Resource Guide. This packet contains the foreword of Anne’s diary, as well as an array of Anne’s diary entries, along with journal/reaction entries I created for the diary entries I selected. I choose some of her most poignant, important entries. You can find the journal/reaction entries here:

Reader Response Journal Entries

The Butterfly Project

In more recent years, I added “The Butterfly Project” to my projects I complete with this unit. If you have never explored this project, you can find more information about it here. This project is a gentle approach to teaching a difficult topic. It focuses on the power one person has to make a difference in today’s challenging world. Sharing personal stories from Holocaust survivors and families, painting ceramic butterflies to honor the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust, and creating art installations as reminders for courage, justice, remembrance, and hope.

This can be an ancillary project for your students to complete. I have the students each take ownership of a poem from the book, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”. Here are some of the butterflies my students have created.