Teaching The Book Thief: Repurposed Pages

Because The Book Thief movie was recently released, I decided to include the book as part of my World Literature class this year. I am so glad I did! Most of the kids absolutely loved this book, and we had fantastic discussions, ranging from Hitler Youth to banned books to the incredible power of words.

The Book Thief is all about words and books, hatred and beauty, death and the capacity for survival. I found lots of activities on the internet for this unit, but my favorite came from The Picky Girl, who ripped pages out of a book, handed each student a page, and had him or her repurpose the page in some way. I tweaked her plan to better fit my classroom, and I was absolutely thrilled with the results.

At home, I ripped pages out of a book. This was a little hard for me to do, particularly after a riveting discussion we had in class about book burning. Some kids maintained that it was OK to burn books that were of no value to them, some said that it was never OK to destroy a book, and a few said they didn't care either way. Oh, and several insisted that if there was a zombie apocalypse, they would not hesitate to burn a book for fuel or use it for toilet paper.

I will confess that it was a Chicken Soup for the Soul book out of which I ripped pages, and it really wasn't that hard to do. (The greater problem for me was pondering why we even had one on our bookshelf.) I ripped the pages out ahead of time rather than doing it for shock value in front of the class. I didn't think they would be particularly shocked, and also I needed to make sure that the pages were G-rated. (Censorship while teaching a book about words. I know.)

In class I handed each student a page with these instructions:

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Your assignment this week, besides finishing the novel, is to repurpose your book page.

The Book Thief is largely a book about the power of words: how words can harm, heal, destroy, or build up. How words can be manipulated, ignored, reclaimed for a different purpose, grasped, and cherished. Max, for example, makes something beautiful out of Mein Kampf.

Writers use a variety of techniques to bring their written words alive for the reader. Zusak particularly uses a lot of similes, metaphors, and personification to hit his readers with vivid images.

Your job is to take a quote from the novel and interpret it creatively from your mind’s eye onto paper. You don’t have to be artistic at all. You can do this in a variety of ways. For example:

• paint over the page like Max did, write the quote, and use some kind of visual illustration. This can be your own drawing or something you cut out from a different source and attach to the page.

• black out words on the page except ones that have to do with your quote. Put the quote on the page in some way.

• Use your page as a frame for the quote, or cut your page out into an image.

#1 Rule: don’t be silly. I really want to see what kind of connections you can make with a quote, a page of words, and your knowledge of the book. Below are several quotes, but you absolutely can use other quotes or phrases from the book.

I included about 20 quotes from the book as ideas, but, as I said in the directions, they could choose their own quotes from the book. I had to include the "don't be silly" part because, well, I knew that one or two would consider this to be a blow-off assignment. 

Here are just a few of their pages:

Instead of using the page, this one took an old dictionary and repurposed it.

This little book actually opens and has a story for the book in it. How cute is that?

 

 

 

How awesome is this? He used his guitar as a canvas for the page. And this is a kid who says he really doesn't like reading.

 

I was positively thrilled with the results. Most of the kids put a lot of thought and creativity into the project. I wanted them to have a hands-on experience with how words can be manipulated, highlighted, and played with, and they totally pulled through.