I Survived the Nazi Invasion, 1944

I won't lie. There's a reason I put-off reading books about wars in book club and that's because they intimidate me. World War 2 has so much content to unpack, where do you even begin?!

 Because this book was very dark compared to others written by Tarshis, I really struggled to find appropriate, respectable activities/games/crafts. Eventually I was able to bring everything together by focusing on the Jews, since the book opens in a Jewish ghetto.

Snack
As always, I like to pull a snack item from the text. The book mentions several different items: potato

These rolls came from Wal*Mart bakery and were ah-mazing!!

soup, raspberries, bread, cheese, apples, frothy milk and water.

Since we had fruit last month for Pompeii, I decided on potato soup and bread. After hitting a few dead ends looking for restaurants that serve potato soup, we settled on mashed potatoes instead.

Mashed potatoes were made in the crock pot 4 hours beforehand and served with rolls, butter, cheese and glasses of milk.

We also had tiny Torah's that were Smartie candy, taped and covered to look like the scrolls. Click here for my printable Torah template. ↙↙↙

Discussion
We had quite a large group this time. Every meeting we go around the room and share our favorite and least favorite parts of the book. If there are other aspects that the group wants to discuss, we can also chase those rabbits. Our discussion time was limited this month because of our size and in order to have time for both our activity and craft.

Since I'd made tiny Torah's to eat, we also briefly talked about the Torah. In the book, Nazi soldiers show up in Esties, Poland (where Max and his sister Zena live) and set fire to the synagogue, destroy Torah scrolls and move the Jews into the ghetto.

In full disclosure, one thing that detracted from our discussion was having snacks during it, coupled with our number. Consistently, we have around 10-13 kids at I Survived Book Club. The last few months we've nearly doubled!!

Activity
(This was a last minute addition since I was afraid our craft wouldn't take very long.)

For our activity, we played a sequencing game using events from the book. I don't have a picture of the game in-play, but if you look at the cover picture for this post, you'll see 4 sets of colored cards.

Kids were divided into 4 teams and each given a set of 17 cards to put in chronological order. They had 10-15 minutes to do so. We went over the answers together.

Click here for printable PDF game cards and answer sheet

Craft
Finding a respectful craft took some digging. Typically, I can pull elements from the book and find a way to make them into a game or craft but as I said before, this book is so much darker than her others.

The bulk of Jewish crafts on Pinterest are centered around the holidays, but JLF Studio had an adorable folding Star of David card, which incorporated well into our discussion and theme.

It involves cutting, folding and decorating. In preparation, I designed both a star template, which was printed off on card stock paper and an insert with a quote from the book about the robin bird.

(In the book, Zena spots a robin which is a sign of good luck, perched on the fence surrounding the ghetto. Just past this fence is a berry bush. Max is able to crawl under it to collect the berries. The bird is mentioned in one other part of the story.)

To decorate our stars once they were all put together we had markers, stickers and little robin birds to cut out.

Click here for printable Star of David template 

Click here for Star of David inserts



And that was all I had for this one! It's not one for the books, but hopefully you can take something away from this. Feel free to use any of my PDF's