The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Socratic Seminar Questions

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne is a deeply moving novel that tells the story of a young boy and his family who live just outside of a concentration camp during the Second World War. The boy’s father is the commandant of the camp, and the boy becomes friends with a young Jewish boy who is interred in the camp.  

This PDF file of Socratic Seminar Questions contains:

- Twenty-six carefully crafted queries on seven pages.

• - The first six pages contain either four or five questions, while the seventh page contains one summary question which requires a more detailed response from the students.

• - All of the questions can be used to facilitate in-class discussions about the novel. 

The Socratic Seminar Questions can also be used for other purposes, such as homework assignments or classroom quizzes, and the pages will help teachers gauge whether or not the students have read and understand the specific sections of the novel. 

It is my hope that these Socratic Seminar Questions will be helpful to teachers who present John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to their students, and I believe that as the students read the novel they will find that the questions help them develop critical thinking skills in English and Language Arts.

Common Core Standards for Reading and Writing for grades seven and eight are included at the end of the Socratic Seminar Questions.

If you find that these questions are helpful to your students, please contact me with the names of other novels that you use in class and I will see if I could write questions for those books. My email address is: gary.ciesla@gmail.com. Thank you.

The PDF includes:

Discussion questions that can be used as homework assignments or quizzes, as well as for in-class discussion.

There is also a teacher's answer key, and a listing of Common Core Standards for grades 7 and 8.