Using The Diary Of A Young Girl In Your Classroom
Most teachers treat this text as a historical document first and a literary one second. That approach works until students ask why Anne sounds like a regular teenager trapped in a closet. It stops working when you try to cover both the Holocaust and coming-of-age themes in the same semester. The real challenge with this book is its length and accessibility. At roughly 90,000 words in the standard Doubleday edition, it is long enough to lose momentum if you push it as solo reading. Most of my students hit a wall around June 1943 entries and start skimming. What helped was shifting to a read-aloud model for the hardest sections and letting students do the easier parts independently. I found that the editorial framing matters more than anyone admits. The standard edition includes editor Otto Frank's cuts and annotations. Those cuts change how certain entries read. In the Westertrek section, for instance, Otto removed passages where Anne described being ill and frightened. If you assign the standard text without mentioning those editorial decisions, students miss half the picture. I make them look at the definitive edition side by side in week three, just to show what got filtered out. Takes twenty minutes. Changes how they read everything else.
The January 1944 entry where Anne writes about her body changing and her feelings for Peter is the one most administrators will flag. It comes up every year. I assign it, but I also have a parent opt-out form ready at the start of the unit. I have never had a student opt out. Parents tend to assume the worst and approve without reading. One parent did call after seeing the passage listed in our syllabus. We spent ten minutes on the phone explaining the pedagogical context. She came to class the next day anyway. Discussion questions should anchor to specific dates, not general themes. "What do you think Anne felt about the war?" produces lazy answers. "Compare her entry from July 1942 to her entry from March 1943. What shifted?" forces close reading. I use a simple two-column graphic organizer where students track changes in tone, topic, and relationships across selected months. Budget about three class periods for the actual diary reading, two for the organizer work, and another three for the post-diary discussions on historical context. The supplementary material is where most teachers burn time. You do not need a full curriculum package. The Anne Frank House website has primary source documents that pair directly with diary entries. The video of Anne's 1944 radio broadcast, the photos of the Secret Annex, the timeline of Nazi policies matching each diary month. One period a week on that material is enough. Anything more turns the unit into a documentary marathon and the diary becomes background noise.
A counter-intuitive point: the book is stronger when students read the later entries first. I sometimes have them jump to the February through August 1944 section on day two. They see Anne's growth as a writer immediately. Then we go back to the beginning chronologically. It keeps them engaged instead of starting with the relatively lighter initial entries and losing them before the darker middle section hits. There are real limits to this approach. The diary is incomplete. The final entries stop mid-thought. Students pick up on that abrupt ending and it can feel unresolved. I address it by assigning a short piece on what happened to the Frank family after August 1944, but the gap between the diary's end and that historical outcome is where the emotional weight lands. Some classes handle it well. Others need a full session on memory, loss, and how incomplete histories function in education. You will know which group you have after the first week. If your school district requires sensitivity reviews for Holocaust materials, start that process early. The diary is generally approved, but the sexual development passages and the description of persecution can trigger review boards that add weeks to your planning. Get the review done in June before the school year starts. Nothing kills momentum like waiting for administrative clearance in October.
Get the Full Details
