Unit Calendar
|
Student Activities
Math Activities |
English Activities |
Survival Simulation: calories expended vs. calories consumed. Students will “hunt” and “gather” food by choosing various methods (fishing, bow hunting, setting snares, gathering berries, etc.) that cost different amounts of expended calories and yield varying results of consumable calories. Students will then calculate their daily expenditure vs. their daily yield to determine their net caloric intake.
|
Anticipation Guide
Students will rank the scenarios 1-16 in order of how easily you could endure them (e.g. “No individual freedoms or protection under the law,” “No access to mass communication,” “Being beaten/killed for stepping out of line”) |
Reaping Simulation
Each student receives a “Character Profile” (gender, age, and brief family bio.) Based on this, they need to decide how many additional tickets they are going to “purchase” for this year’s reaping + cumulative tickets to get the total number of tickets that will be going into the lottery this year. Aggregate the class data and then calculate their individual odds of being selected as tribute. List by rank on the board/class website for comparison purposes. Then hold an actual reaping and compare the results with the odds. Discussion Forum
Students will discuss and compare their findings from their census analysis with other groups. Students will reflect on their findings in preparation for creating their own dictatorship. |
Public Service Announcement
Once students become acquainted with the various social and economic problems presented in The Hunger Games, they will draw connections to social problems occurring in our own society that relates to the problems/themes in the book. Topics can include but are not limited to: Child exploitation, violence in media, TV addiction, reality TV, poverty, unsafe working conditions, inequitable distribution of resources, income inequality, homelessness, social inequality, police brutality, big government, propaganda, censorship, monopolies, oppression, or freedom of speech. Students will choose a topic and conduct research to learn about the real-world implications for this problem as well as to locate and learn about existing organizations already working to combat it. From there, they will design a brief Public Service Announcement campaign to raise awareness and/or to call for action regarding their topic. Final PSA can be a series of three posters, a 30-second video, a 30-second radio spot, a brochure, or an informative webpage. Rubric: |
|
U.S. Census Analysis (Population, Resource, and Wealth Dispersion.) Working in groups of 4, each group will receive a region of the U.S. to analyze population, resource, and wealth dispersion. They will calculate highs, lows, and averages; and create overlay maps to discover patterns and trends, and then draw conclusions to explain why things are dispersed the way they are.
|
|
Literary Journal
The Literary Journal is a reading companion to support students’ comprehension and analysis of The Hunger Games. It is chunked into 3 packets (to correspond to 3 sections of the novel) and broken down by chapter. Contains space for taking notes on character development, plot progression, inferences and predictions, personal reflection, Word Journal (vocabulary by chapter), and contains content/analysis questions to support comprehension and analysis, and reflection on essential questions. |
Collaborative Unit Activity
Create a Dictatorship: Dictatorship Map
Working with the map they drafted in English, students will create a to-scale version in order to calculate basic statistics about their dictatorship: border length, square area, distance between major cities, and population/resource density and distribution. Rubric: |
Create Your Own Dictatorship Final Project Working in small groups and drawing on the knowledge they gain from The Hunger Games about power, people, resources, and means of control, students will design, create, and describe their own imagined dictatorship. This project is conducted in tandem with Math, so that students will create one cumulative project from work they have completed in both classes. The final projects must be presented digitally in a website or virtual brochure. During the last day of the unit, students will be able to view and assess their peers by participating in a virtual Gallery Walk. The Dictatorship will contain the following components created in/during English class:
a. Constitution/Manifesto: Students will write their own Constitution or Manifesto for their dictatorship. This should describe their chosen system of government, explain the philosophical role of government, and describe the relationship between the government and its people. It should be written in an elevated formal style. c. Economic Analysis: Students will conduct an analytical look at their dictatorship’s economic system by describing the overall economic system (e.g., centrally planned, free market, capitalist, socialist, etc.). They will explain both natural and man-made resource distribution and describe how this distribution impacts the different local sub-economies. Students will also describe the different ways that the general populace meets its economic needs (e.g., barter, international trade, specialization and trade, self-sufficiency, central planning, etc.) d. Means and methods of control: Using The Hunger Games as a model for what to do OR what not to do, students will develop a series of methods and strategies that the central government can employ in order to ensure social order and control. Students should describe in details at least five different strategies based on the following: economic control, social control, psychological control. Students must then justify their use of these controls by providing some rationale for why they would be effective. |