Excerpts
Excerpts from Anne Frank need to be based on picking parts of why she writes. Why is her diary the one thing that she can trust to listen to? What her feelings of isolation have felt like. How even in her situation she never gave up on hope. How she describes herself. How she wants to be remembered even if she dies and if someone were to find her diary. Make sure that you pull shorter sections from the book so that the students can easily reference it and it can be re-read over and over again. 11
In Freedom Writers I chose excerpts where students felt like they were unheard or not understood. Where they were stereotyped, it can even be from the view of Ms. Gruwell, where on page 47, she talks about how other teachers stereotyped her by assuming as a first-year teacher she would be a failure because she was with freshmen, which statistically are the most challenging group coming out of eight grade. She went on to discuss different things that she was called just because she chose to dress nice to work to set the image. They would say harassing things to her when she was able to take kids on field trips when the other teachers just didn’t want to or didn’t seem to find the need to and then there was a point where she understood why first-year teachers there leave so quickly because of how the staff that is supposed to be the village she works with put her down so much. Pull the parts where it discusses that Anne Frank was the same age as most of the kids in your class. They can find similarities just in that alone.12
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