The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

1. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Lesson 1

2. Lesson Objectives • At the end of this lesson, students should be able to: • Retrieve specific information from the text to answer questions and make predictions • Use discussion skills to form a view about characters and the likely direction of a story

3. Book Covers • What can we learn about a book by looking at its cover? • Using the worksheet in front of you, create a list of questions you have about each book cover. • For example: Who are these boys? Characters in the story?

4. Which boy does the title refer to? • We cannot see their facial expressions. Are they happy or sad? • Where are they? • Why do they have numbers pinned to their pyjamas? • Is one boy older than the other? • Are they brothers or friends? • Is this a posed photograph?

5. Do we associate the stripes with the word pyjamas in the title? • Are the stripes on the cover anything to do with the ‘boy’? • Are they his pyjamas? • The colour seems old fashioned: is this because the story is from the past? • The stripes seem a little dirty. Why?

6. To whom do the pyjamas belong? • Why are there dirty smudges on the pyjamas? • Who would neatly fold a pair of dirty pyjamas? • What is the importance of the number on the pyjamas? • What does the barbed wire in the background suggest?

7. Information on the cover • A book’s blurb is very important to a reader. When he or she takes it down from the shelf in the bookshop it’s what makes them decide to buy the book or not. When the novel was being prepared for publication I wrote the following blurb and sent it to my publisher: • John Boyne

8. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he is upset to discover that all his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion at work and the family has to move from their luxurious home to a new city, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. Worse still, the new house has a tall fence running alongside it that stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the children he can see in the distance on the other side. • But Bruno longs to be a great explorer like his heroes Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place and sets off one day to see how far the fence runs. And it is while exploring that he meets another little boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own.

9. The story in this book is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the jacket, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about. • If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. (Though this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. • Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to encounter such a fence. • From the publisher of the novel

10. Whole Class Reading Let’s begin our reading of the novel. Turn to page 1 and continue to the end of chapter 4.

11. Development • When and where is the book set? • How old is Bruno? • Where does he live, and with whom? • What impression do we get of Bruno?

12. Plenary • Working on P.E.E. paragraphs and making predictions:So far, we have discovered that Bruno is moving house because... • Using the worksheet provided, find evidence to back up your thoughts about the three questions.