HOLISTIC UNIT PLAN: THE HUNGER GAMES

Our Hunger Games novel study unit has been designed for a Grade 9 Applied classroom, however, can be adapted for other uses. This unit will be implemented over four weeks, with the assumption that we will be teaching three lessons per week. In total our unit is comprised of 12 lessons. The novel is divided into three sections: The Reaping, The Games, and The Victor. Thus, we felt that a natural way to divide the unit would be to focus on one part of the book each week, and allow the last week for the creation of a summative assignment. In order to maximize classroom discussion and participation, we would be asking our students to complete the first section of the book prior to the first week of the unit, read the second part before the second week etcetera However, it is important to note that we are well aware that the majority of our students will be extremely familiar with the plot, characters and themes of the Hunger Games. Since this book is one of the most popular Young Adult novels at this time, our students have probably seen the movie and read the series, and this allows those who struggle with reading to still be able to participate fully in our unit. In addition, it allows us to explore themes and ideas with more breadth and depth, since the context and main ideas will be clear to most students. The Hunger Games is a rich text that contains many exciting themes and lends itself to incredibly creative activities. Our biggest challenge was narrowing down what we wanted to do with the students. In order to allow for flexibility and to fit within an inquiry based unit, we felt that we should give our students a lot of choice in the types of assignments that they conduct and the modes that they want to express their ideas throughout the unit. We first came up with main themes that we though students might want to explore over the course of the novel study. These included: social inequality, poverty, empathy, oppression, power dynamics, propaganda and brainwashing, survival, desensitization, to name a few. Through discussing these themes and ideas for activities that students could get passionate about, we came up with a unit that we all feel excited about the opportunity to utilize in our teaching careers.

Overview of Unit Week One The Reaping This week will focus on Panem and looking at parallels to our own society. We will discuss the concept of the critical question and inquiry-based learning, in order to allow students to formulate their own critical questions relating to the novel. We will discuss themes of poverty, social inequality, oppression, power, coercion and propaganda. We will explore the seeds of dystopia that exist in our current world. Moreover, will look at the concept of feminism, and begin to explore how to look at this novel through a critical feminist lens. We will explore traditional ways that female heroes are portrayed, and ultimately attempt to answer the question: Is Katniss a feminist hero or anti-hero? The Games We will begin this section of the unit exploring how it would feel to be in the position of having just entered the Hunger Games. This will be explored through a free-write activity. Students will continue to be creative through acting out scenes from the book and engaging in Forum Theatre. We believe that through writing and acting, students will be able to think about the book in new and exciting ways. The Victor We believe this week could provide an exciting opportunity to compare and contrast the book Hunger Games with the movie. We will attempt to uncover reasons why the director, producer and screenwriter of the movie made these particular changes. As a class, we will discuss the ethics surrounding our current media: including exploitation within reality TV, and the ethical issues that surround our current Olympic games. Inquiry based unit planning allows for students to come up with their own ideas for a summative assignment. Minecraft, Voki and other computer programs allow for great creativity to be utilized. Using Minecraft or Voki, students can participate in the Hunger Games as a certain character.

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

Reflection We were lucky in choosing to focus on The Hunger Games for our unit plan. Not only is it a great book that many students choose to read on their own and enjoy, but it is also full of rich themes to explore in a novel study unit. We were also very fortunate to be able to plan this unit together. Everyone brought strong ideas and perspectives, as well as their own interpretations and strengths to the planning of this unit. Planning together meant that one persons great idea could be added to and enriched by the other group members, and ideas that were not so great could be talked through and discarded or re-imagined into something better. Every unit should have this kind of collaboration and feedback; it was such an exciting and creative process that has resulted in an inquiry-based unit that we all wish we were actually able to teach in this upcoming practicum. To begin planning our unit we sat down and made a list of the themes in the novel that we could possibly explore in a unit. Our list was extensive; it included desensitization, neocolonialism, social inequality, coercion/brainwashing, oppression, empathy, resistance, ethics and exploitation, propaganda and many other rich themes. As we came up with this list of themes we simultaneously thought of ways to make them meaningful. We thought of connections to current events, to the geo-political state of the world, to popular culture, and to students lives as a whole (youth, responsibility, etc.). We thought that we could bring in things like the news, the Olympics and reality TV to situate discussions of the novels themes in a meaningful and authentic context for the students. From there, we were really excited to take our ideas and actually design a unit.

We had a lot of ideas about ways we could potentially design lessons for this novel study unit, but we continuously had to keep questioning whether a lesson idea was genuinely inquiry-based or not. We really wanted to incorporate a lot of creativity into our lessons and for this unit to be genuinely enjoyable for the students, not just acceptable from a curriculum and teaching standpoint. We talked a lot about using drama: forum theatre, role-playing, skit writing, etc. We liked that drama allowed for creativity, but also required a good understanding of the characters, contexts and motivations of the novel. It also allowed for serious reflection on perspective and justification within the context of the novels dark themes. We also all agreed that class and small group discussions were a vital part of the inquiry basis of this novel study. From there we started planning out our unit in more detail. We planned the unit holistically before we worked on detailed lesson plans. We started by deciding that The Hunger Games would be a great book to teach with either intermediate or senior level classes because of its themes, popularity and accessibility to students. Based on this, we decided to make our unit applicable to a grade nine class, so it could be in the middle in terms of difficulty and expectations, and could be scaled up or down accordingly for other grade levels. We looked at the curriculum for specific expectations (found on the lesson plans) and then planned out a hypothetical class schedule to use as an anchor for our lesson planning. We decided on a four-week unit with three one-hour classes a week, likely because we are so used to planning for four units thanks to our experiences in practicum. Being so comfortable with units of this length is

a good starting point for us as teachers, but we are going to need to work on designing and implementing units of varying lengths when we have classrooms of our own. We looked back at the course readings to get a sense of which of the ideas for lesson presentation we had come up with would work best. We had to fine-tune our ideas about the themes and approaches to the unit. While all the readings have been really interesting and informative, four of them were particularly applicable to our unit and what we hoped to achieve with it. Simons (2012) article, Without comic books there would be no me: teachers as connoisseurs of adolescents literary lives, was key in reinforcing our desire to keep our unit creative and driven by giving students choices of how to present their learning and understanding of the book. VanDe Weghes (2003) article on classroom discussions of literature provided the theoretical evidence to support our decision to use so much discussion in our unit. He also reminded us to focus on critical and authentic questions without known answers, so that students opinions were validated and were authentic representations of their learning and understanding. Ensruds (2002) article on students questions inspired the framework of the repeated use of questioning and free-writing in our lessons. Piries (1997) article on incorporating dramatic arts provided the theoretical evidence to support our desire to incorporate a lot of drama and performance into our unit. It was really nice to see that our initial ideas were in keeping with the literature on teaching English. It was actually hardest to make the curriculum work, not the theoretical practices.

Finally we actually planned and wrote the three lessons included in this assignment. They are good lessons, with inquiry-based questions that provide students with multiple ways to demonstrate their learning. There is a lot more we would have liked to do with the themes in this book and this unit, but three lessons is really only a sample taste of our unit. In co-writing a unit we were able to combine ideas into creative lessons and a strong potential unit that hopefully we will all either be able to use with The Hunger Games in the future, or at least modify it for another, similar YA novel.