Hunger Games Activities
With the cosmic success of The Hunger Games, many teachers are combing the net and wracking their brains for Hunger Games activities. Fortunately, The Hunger Games is a great novel for spawning engaging, meaningful activities, and it is easy to go beyond the regular standards.The first thing you might want to consider when planning your Hunger Games activities is a research project. Their are several ways you can approach this. You could begin by conducting a brief lesson on what it means to be "oppressive" and "repressive," then talk about how governments can sometimes be oppressive and repressive. Students then go the the computer lab or library in groups to research various oppressive regimes around the world today. This is a great Hunger Games activity because it helps students link the text to the real world, making it more relevant and meaningful.
There are also many Hunger Games activities you can devise and conduct focusing on characters from the novel. Instead of launching right into a traditional character sketch, consider having your students begin with a social media profile. Students love to create facebook and twitter profiles for characters, and this is particularly true for The Hunger Games. In fact, creating a facebook profile is probably the most engaging of all Hunger Games activities students.
Once students have created social media profiles, you can teach them the proper structure and content for a character sketch. They then have their profiles to consult while writing their sketches, which provides scaffolding and creates a logical flow between Hunger Games activities.
Another fun activity to do with The Hunger Games is to have your students create propaganda posters. Begin with a lesson about propaganda in general. What is it? When and where has it been used? What is its purpose? Why is it effective? Then have students create propaganda posters that the Capitol might post throughout the districts. This might be my favorite of all the Hunger Games activities I do.
There are also many opportunities for fun, creative activities while studying The Hunger Games. Students with an artistic flair a eye for fashion get a big kick out of designing their own Tribute costumes. You can also have students design their own diabolical Hunger Games arena.
The Hunger Games is a wonderful novel to teach. The students love it, and there are many important issues and themes to explore. I hope the suggestions above help show you the range of possibilities when devising Hunger Games activities.
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