Teachers Guide – Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

Teaching Genocide in ELA classrooms, with Russia’s current war on Ukraine as the focus.

After writing the Kidnapped from Ukraine trilogy over a frenzied 17 months, I tried to take a break from writing in 2025. I did manage to not write fiction, but ended up writing book contributions and other non-fiction things, including chapter four, “Crafting Historical Fiction: Rehumanizing Global Crises Through Character Development” in Sarah J. Donovan’s upcoming book, Teaching Genocide and Holocaust Education in ELA Classrooms: Language to Remember, Witness, and Repair.

I selected Russia’s current war on Ukraine as my genocide focus, and the rehumanizing of the victim exercise uses a scene from Standoff as a launching point.

Sarah Smith’s reading guides for Bombs trilogy

A while ago an educator contacted me, letting me know that she was creating reading guides for my first WWII trilogy. Educators make reading guides of my books all the time, frequently getting basics wrong (even misspelling my name) so I was impressed that she approached me first. I asked if she’d show them to me when she was finished, and she kindly did just that. They’re excellent, and available via teacherspayteachers. Here are the links for each of them:

Stolen Girl guide

Making Bombs for Hitler guide

The War Below guide

Teachers’ guide for Winterkill

Very pleased to have a teachers’ guide for Winterkill that is freely available for use. Thank you, HREC ED, for funding it, and thank you Kristen Davison for creating it.

Winterkill Teachers’ Guide

guides for other books