Night by Elie Wiesel Lesson Plan: Activities, Writing Prompts, and Test Ideas

In roughly 120 pages, Wiesel wrote one of the most powerful books that students will ever encounter.  

And yet, it’s easy for them to read the book without actually taking much away from the experience. The straightforward language makes it easy for students to move quickly through his memoir, while the brutality of Wiesel’s experience can push them to distance themselves from what they’re reading.

I want students to leave their study of this book with more than a memory of a few shocking scenes.  I want them to really take its lessons with them.

So what are the most important lessons for students to learn in their study of this brief memoir?

When I designed my unit on Night, I wanted to make sure that students understood that genocide happened before the Holocaust, that it has happened since, and that “never again” means never again for anyone at any time.

I also wanted students to learn about the many ways that people resisted the Nazis, even when they had very little power and faced enormous risks. Stories of incredibly brave resistance give students so much to consider about how people can challenge those in power, protect one another, and organize against oppression. And given the world that our students are inheriting, those lessons are hardly theoretical.

And finally, I want them to see why a really good book matters—how a story can reach across time, make us care about people we will never meet, and move us to change the world.

Here are my 8 tips for building a lesson plan for Night that helps students slow down, read deeply, and take its lessons with them.

Introduce this distilled book with a six-word memoir unit.

As a way of introducing memoir, and teaching students how less can be more, I like to open a unit on Night with a six-word memoir activity.  Wiesel famously whittled his book down from 800 pages to 120, and so it seems fitting to start with a super minimalist writing assignment. 

My favorite method for writing these mini memoirs is to have students start with a lot—a few pages of freewrites—and then cut that down until they are left with the bare minimum they need to tell their stories. While this unit is quick, it is a great tool for sharing their stories with their classmates—and getting students to start thinking about why it matters to learn the life stories of others. 

Get students to care before they start reading.

Because Night can be both a tough read and feel like a story about a very distant time and place, I think it’s important to get student buy-in before delving into the book. So for pre-reading activities, I like to focus on why we study the Holocaust. 

I want students to come to the conclusion that this is something worth learning about on their own—and so rather than give them a slideshow or lecture on reasons to study the Holocaust, I have them work through varied sources. Students explore “First They Came”  by Pastor Martin Niemoller, “From School Yard Bullying to Genocide” a TED Talk by Barbara Coloroso, Wiesel’s reflections on memory, an opinion piece on refugees, and a study of Holocaust awareness.  These different sources get them considering the connections among bullying, indifference, persecution, and our responsibility to one another. 

After exploring the different sources, students bring it all together in an in-class synthesis essay in which they develop their own ideas and support them with evidence.  What I like most about this unit is that students make their own connections among very different sources—and choose the ones that spoke to them most for their synthesis essays.

Give students a routine that builds toward deeper discussion.

My usual routine—opening freewrite, close reading questions, discussion questions, closing freewrite—really helps students to go deep in their understanding of a text, and so I don’t mess with success.

The daily plans start with a bellringer freewrite prompt. I find that getting students to write in response to low-stakes writing prompts about big ideas helps build their writing fluency and prepares them to explore those ideas in the text. Probably my favorite freewrite prompt for chapter one, for example, is this one: “When something bad happens, do you prefer to forget it or remember it? Why? What are the benefits of forgetting? What are the benefits of remembering?”  This gets students thinking about the themes of memory and remembrance, but in a low-pressure way.

For the first few chapters, I like to focus a lot on close reading to make sure that students are really noticing the details of the text.  For example, in chapter one, I want them to notice both what happened to Moishe when he was deported and how he has changed when he returns. I also want students to pay attention to the way Wiesel writes. So in that same chapter, I ask students to consider statements like “It was to be the last night spent in our house” or “We were on our way,” describe his tone and style, and explore why he might have chosen to write this way and how it affects them as readers. Some students might find his sparse, almost emotionless style harder to connect with, while others might say that the events are so horrific that there really is no way to put them into words. It might feel like we are going slowly, but that attention to detail will pay off later. 

Once students are more comfortable with the book, I think its a good idea to vary the routine by moving straight into an open-ended discussion or having them closely read a single passage from the chapter. By then, they’ve practiced noticing both what Wiesel tells us and how he tells it, so they have more to bring to the discussion than their first reactions to the events.

My favorite closing activity is another freewrite—but this time, students explore how the same topic appears in the book. This gives them a chance to consider the text’s themes and refine their own thoughts on the topic. I like that they get to return to an idea they’ve already considered and see how reading and discussing the text has complicated their thinking.

Have students write reading responses on the book.

Because Night offers so much to unpack in terms of both the writing and the content, I like to have students write reading responses on the chapters. 

My process for reading responses is to get students writing about specific passages by choosing a quote, noticing details in the language, and working through what those details might mean. I also push them to explore what doesn’t quite fit, where the text seems to contradict itself, and what questions they can’t easily answer. I want them to grapple with the text’s complexity and ambiguity, even when that means ending with more questions than they started with.

Starting small gives them a way into the bigger questions without expecting them to have a fully formed interpretation before they start writing. I give them concrete steps at first, but the goal is for students to become more independent in what they notice, what they question, and what they have to say about the book.  These informal responses also give them ideas to develop in their final essay on the book..

Include lots of paired sources.

As one of my main goals in teaching Night is to help students understand the variety of experiences during the Holocaust and recognize that genocide is not limited to this one historical event, I include a wide range of paired sources in the unit.

Sometimes, this means reading a contemporary article like “The New Way of War: Killing the Kids” by Robin Wright, published in The New Yorker, examining a photo essay, or listening to an NPR story on the lost music of the Holocaust.  Sometimes, it means delving deeper into a literary text like “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick, “The Birthday of the World” by Marge Piercy, or the slam poetry of Emtithal Mahmoud. (And if you take nothing else from this post, I really hope you check out the fabulous poetry of Emi Mahmoud!)

When pairing sources with Night, I think about what I want students to explore and how much time they’ll need. I like to use shorter sources to broaden their perspective as they read and save the more literary texts until they’ve finished the memoir, when they can consider connections across the works as a whole.

Teach students about resistance movements.

When I first learned about the incredibly brave people who were involved in the different Holocaust resistance movements, I knew I needed to make a mini unit on the topic. Not only because I wanted students to have a more nuanced understanding of the history, but also because I wanted them to consider how they might apply these lessons of powerful resistance for their own lives. 

First, I get students thinking about the concept of resistance by exploring Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, a poem about resistance, and the TED Talk “The Secret to Effective Non-Violent Resistance” by Jamila Raqib. 

After that, students break into small groups to research real-life resistance movements like Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, the 1942 Norwegian Teacher Resistance, or The Bielski Partisans.  After reading a few pre-vetted sources, students compare different groups in a jigsaw activity.  

What they learn is that resistance doesn’t just mean starting a revolution—there are and have been all sorts of powerful acts that people undertake, big and small, as individuals and working together to combat oppression.

Give a unit test that continues the learning.

To be honest, I sort of hate giving tests, but I do want to know what students are taking away from a unit.  My favorite format for tests that doesn’t feel like a waste of students’ time or mine is to give them quote IDs followed by short essays. 

I like the quote IDs because they really reward students who have grappled with the text in order to answer the close reading or discussion questions—and students who haven’t been interacting with the text because they’ve been reading summaries generally don’t do as well. Quote IDs also give students a good amount of flexibility since I ask them to explain what the quote is about as well as why it’s important.  For the second part of their response, there are many different correct answers—as long as students can relate the details of the passage to the bigger themes of the book, they usually get full credit.

Similarly, for the short essays I like to give a lot of choice.  Honestly, this is as much for the teacher as the student!  Reading the same exact response over and over again is too much.  For example, I give students a writing prompt that includes a quote from Anne Frank and have them write on whether or not Wiesel seems to support the belief that “people are truly good at heart.”  Obviously, there are plenty of examples in the book they can choose to discuss to make an argument for both sides.  What I’m looking for is students’ own thoughtful take on the prompt, developed in a clear paragraph with at least three specific references to the text. I want them to use those details to develop their own interpretation, rather than simply summarize what happened.

Give a final essay that builds on students’ reading responses.  

The final element of the unit tasks students with reading over their own reading responses on Night in order to craft a quote-based essay.  While this is a challenging task for sure, I find that having that basis of both ideas and quotes gives students a great jumping off point.  They often end up using only some of what they’ve already written, but not having to start from zero really gives them more opportunity to succeed.

Because I want students to understand the history and carry those lessons beyond this unit, I want them to do more than answer a question I give them.

Looking back over their reading responses helps them notice which ideas they kept returning to, which passages stayed with them, and how their thinking changed as they read. They then use those discoveries to develop their own argument about the book, supported by close reading of the text.

I recommend having students write this essay in a writing workshop so you can give them feedback as they work rather than after they’re done.

Final notes.

I taught Night when I was in the classroom, but since leaving, I spent months creating the complete unit on Night I wish I’d had then. It was not easy, and I have to admit that there are scenes from the book that I wish I could forget. But I do think it’s such an important book to teach in high school.

Whenever I felt like quitting, I thought of Wiesel’s statement “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.” I’m proud of the unit that I built to help students slow down, learn about the Holocaust, and understand how the lessons of the book still apply today.