The Devil’s Arithmetic Socratic Seminar Questions

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen is a deeply moving novel that tells the story of the tragic lives and deaths that Polish Jews suffered in the German concentration camps during the Second World War.

This PDF file of Socratic Seminar Questions contains thirty-five carefully crafted queries on nine pages. The first eight pages contain four questions each. An additional ninth page contains three summary questions which require more detailed responses 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 Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic 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.

An ANSWER KEY for The Devil’s Arithmetic can be found on the pages immediately following the Socratic Seminar Questions. The applicable Common Core Standards for Reading and Writing for grades 7 and 8 can be found at the end of the ANSWER KEY section.

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 can write questions for those books. My email address is: gary.ciesla@gmail.com. Thank you.

You can find similar resources in my store!

The PDF includes:

Questions that can be used to stimulate class discussions, as homework assignments, or even as quizzes to check student understanding.

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