Summer Novel Assignments 2016
Exiting Grade 9
Read: Students exiting Grade 9 will read Night
by Elie Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece: a candid, horrific, and deeply
poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in
the Nazi death camps.
Respond: Students will respond to a variety of comprehension
questions ranging among the literal, interpretive, and critical
levels. These questions will require the use of higher order skills
and citing of evidence from the text.
1. Describe the failure of Sighet Jews to anticipate Nazi terrorism.
2. Describe the behavior of hungry prisoners.
3. Recount Elie’s surgery.
4. Discuss characters who stand out in Elie’s memory.
5. Explain how the Nazis transport prisoners.
6. Explain how human beings respond to a concentration camp.
7. Analyze the pressures that separate Elie from God.
8. Discuss Elie’s guilt after Shlomo’s death.
9. Explain why Night is useful to a study of World War II.
10. Discuss whether the author leads the reader to hope of despair.
Create: Students will choose one of the following interdisciplinary activities to complete.
1. Explain in a short speech the right of individuals to assemble peacefully and to worship
without harassment or intervention. Include commentary on other segments of the Bill of
Rights, especially freedom of speech. Why is the concept of habeas corpus a major benefit
to democracy? How did this concept evolve from the Magna Carta?
2. Determine the current cost of imprisoning a person for a year. List the amenities that
prisoners can expect, such as exercise, medical care, education, religious rights, family visits,
telephone and mail privileges, legal advice and rehabilitation. Write a comparison to the
services Elie received when imprisoned.
3. Consider how bigotry demoralizes, oppresses, and encourages violence. Incorporate
examples from various regions of the world and develop a poem, essay, visual or auditory
representation.
Submit: Students will submit responses to the questions and their completed project on
September 19, 2016 to their Language Arts teacher.
Adapted From Perma-Bound Living Literature Series 2007