Core Skills Analysis
English: Reading and Literature
The child read John Marsden’s novel *Tomorrow, When the War Began* and engaged with a work of young adult fiction. Through reading, the child encountered a sustained narrative and had the opportunity to follow its characters, events, and ideas across the novel. The activity supported literary engagement and reading stamina, while bringing the child into contact with Marsden’s storytelling and language.
Humanities: Civics and Citizenship
The novel’s wartime setting offered the child a way to encounter ideas about conflict and its effects on people and communities through fiction. Reading the story supported consideration of how individuals and groups respond when circumstances change dramatically. This provided a literary starting point for thinking about community, responsibility, and the human consequences of conflict.
Tips
Tips Invite the child to keep a reading journal, recording key events and how the story’s ideas develop. Choose a passage to discuss how the author builds tension, then try rewriting it from another character’s viewpoint. Explore the novel’s wartime context together using age-appropriate historical sources, distinguishing documented history from fictional storytelling. To connect the themes to lived experience, discuss how communities prepare for emergencies and identify reliable local sources of safety information.
Book Recommendations
- Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden: The novel read in this activity, following a group of Australian teenagers confronted by a sudden wartime crisis.
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: A young adult novel set in Nazi Germany that explores storytelling, relationships, and life during wartime.
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank: A published diary offering a young person’s account of hiding during the Holocaust; a meaningful historical contrast to wartime fiction.
Learning Standards
- Australian Curriculum: English — AC9E8LE01: Exploring how literary texts represent people, places, and experiences; the novel provides material for considering its characters and wartime setting.
- Australian Curriculum: English — AC9E8LE03: Examining how language features and literary devices shape meaning and audience response; supported by reading Marsden’s narrative.
- Australian Curriculum: English — AC9E8LY05: Reading and comprehending texts for different purposes, using comprehension strategies to interpret and evaluate ideas; connected to reading and following a full novel.
Try This Next
- Reading journal: note a significant event in each reading session and how it changes the story.
- Character-and-event map: sketch the characters and connect them to important moments in the novel.
- Writing prompt: rewrite a short scene from another character’s perspective.
- Discussion quiz: identify details that signal the story’s setting, tension, and themes.