World War II

A Literature Circle Unit for fifth grade

Organized and created by:

Victoria Hightower, Morgan Vassey,

and Kathryn McKinney

The theme of this unit is to bring together different works of literature about World War II and incorporate each work into a literature circle unit primarily composed for fifth graders .  

This unit deals with several different books, each written from various different points of view about the war.  We have focused on books written about the Holocaust and how it affected the Jewish people of Europe as well as the Japanese internment camps in America.

The books we used for this unit are as follows:

The Devil’s Arithmetic, written (by Jane Yolen)   upper 6^th grade reading level 

 created by Victoria Hightower

Number the Stars (by Lois Lowry) 5^th grade

The Journal of Ben Uchida (by Barry Denenburg) From the Dear America Series  5^th Grade

created by Morgan Vassey

Twenty and Ten (by Claire Huchet Bishop) 4^th grade

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (by Eleanor Coerr) 4^th grade

Faithful Elephants (by Yukio Tsuchiya) 4^th grade

Baseball Saved Us ( by Ken Mochizuki) 4th grade

 Created by Kathryn McKinney