2. AGENDA
Teams 1
Discussion: Readings 16-38
Discussion: The Hunger Games: Stories
Presentation: Essay #2
In-Class Writing: page 46 SMG
1. Beginning with a quotation/transitioning to
your remembered event.
2. Vivid presentation of a place: Using sensory
details: 643-648
3. 2. The teams will change on or near essay due dates.
3. You must change at least 50% of your team after
each project is completed.
4. You may never be on a team with the same person
more than twice.
5. You may never have a new team composed of more
than 50% of any prior team.
1. We will often use teams to
earn participation points.
Your teams can be made
up of 4 or 5 people.
4. Points will be earned
for correct answers
to questions,
meaningful
contributions to the
discussion, and the
willingness to share
your work. Each
team will track their
own points, but
cheating leads to
death (or loss of 25
participation points).
Answers, comments,
and questions must
be posed in a
manner that
promotes learning.
Those who speak out
of turn or with
maliciousness will
not receive points for
their teams.
5. At the end of each class,
you will turn in a point
sheet with the names of
everyone in your group
and your accumulated
points for the day.
It is your responsibility
to make the sheet, track
the points, and turn it
in.
Sit near your team
members in class to
facilitate ease of group
discussions
6. Your First
Group!
Get into groups of
four. (1-2 minutes)
If you can’t find a
group, please raise
your hand.
Once your group is
established, choose
one person to be the
keeper of the points.
Write down
members’ names
Keep track of
points
Turn in your sheet
at the end of the
class period.
7. The Hunger Games
Katniss Everdeen
Gale Hawthorne
Peeta Mellark
Prim Everdeen
Mrs. Everdeen
Rue
Haymitch Abernathy
Cinna
Effie Trinket
In your groups, make a list of one or more important experiences each of these
characters has. What kind of emotion does each provoke? Can you relate to any
one of these experiences?
8. In your groups, discuss your homework posts
concerning analyzing writing strategies
(Post #3): 6-8 minutes.
12. Jean Brandt “Calling Home”
1. How does Brandt set the stage for her story? How does she try to
get you to identify with her?
2. What is your first impression of Brandt? What is the author’s
attitude toward her younger self?
3. Point out active verbs that enliven the text. What is the effect of all
these action Verbs? (particularly par 3-5).
4. Look for places in the essay where Brandt discloses her feelings at
the time the event occurred. What do you learn about Brandt from
her remembered thoughts in pars. 5–8?
5. How does your understanding of Brandt deepen or change
through what she writes in pars. 16–18?
6. Note the dialogue. What techniques can you identify? How does
the dialogue in pars. 21–24 add to the drama?
7. What is the effect of interweaving storytelling and describing with
remembering thoughts and feelings in par. 35?
8. How, and how well, does this ending work? Consider it in
conjunction with the introduction.
In your groups, discuss the following questions: 5 minutes
13.
14. The Writing Assignment
Using The Hunger Games as your starting point,
write an essay about an event in your life that will
engage readers and that will, at the same time, help
them understand the significance of the event. Tell
your story dramatically and vividly in three to five
pages.
Format: MLA style (For help, see “MLA
Formatting” on the website”). Please give your
paper an original title; don't underline or put
quotation marks around your own title.
15. The Goal: Writing a Good Introduction
The Strategy:
Choose a provocative or interesting quotation (four typed lines or
more) from The Hunger Games and integrate it into your
introduction. You can start with the quotation, or you can work it
in after a few sentences.
Summarize what is happening in the novel at the point of your
quotation, and then explain the context (particular setting) for the
quotation. This is important because it sets up the connection to
your own experience.
Then, write a transition paragraph, making a connection between
the quotation and the event in your life. Your thesis sentence will
likely be the sentence in which you clearly make that connection
(we will talk more about theses in our next meeting).
16. Before the opening ceremonies, Katniss meets with her stylist, Cinna, to prepare. Cinna
presses a button and a fancy meal of “Chicken and chunks of oranges cooked in a creamy sauce
laid on a bed of pearly white grain, tiny green peas and onions, rolls shaped like flowers, and for
dessert, a pudding the color of honey” appears (65). Katniss thinks about how difficult it would be
to get a meal like this in District 12:
What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a
button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for
sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the
Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of
tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?
I look up and find Cinna’s eyes trained on mine. ‘How despicable we must seem to
you,’ he says. (65)
Katniss doesn’t respond to Cinna’s statement, but she agrees in her head. “He’s right, though. The
whole rotten lot of them is despicable” (65).
Although our world does not really consist of a Capitol and many districts, there are still some
people who live more comfortably than others. For people like me who live in privilege, life is
easy. Food is readily available if I want to eat. Outside of school, I don’t really have many
responsibilities. I don’t have to worry about how I will survive day to day. My family has told me
on many occasions to think about how lucky I am to live the way I do. In other countries, life is
hard. In Africa, children starve to death as a result of famine and poverty. People my age in some
countries are working more than my parents do. Katniss’s disgust for the extravagant Capitol is
similar to the disgust I felt for myself when I listened to an account of one man’s visit to factories in
China.
How Despicable We Must Seem
17. 1. Choose a provocative or interesting quotation (four typed lines or more) from
The Hunger Games that you can connect to an experience in your own life.
2. Summarize what is happening in the novel at the point of your quotation.
3. Then, write a transition paragraph, making a connection between the quotation
and the event in your life.
4. Now make a quick narrative ladder:
Where and when did your event
take place?
Setting
Rising action
Climax
Resolution
18. The Goal: Create A Vivid Presentation of Places
Recreate the time and place of the event
Ground readers in specifics:
• When? Christmas morning; one day in late fall, Saturday night
• Where? At a 7-11 in San Jose, at my Aunt Helen’s Easter party, In the back alley
of a club in Sunnyvale
Name specific objects
• White, spherical snowball
• City clothes
• Translucent skin
• Dirty sidewalk
19. The Strategy: Listing Key
Places
Make a list of all the places where the event occurred,
skipping some space after each entry on your list.
In the space after each entry on your list, make
some notes describing each place. What do you
see (except people for now)? What objects
stand out? Are thy large or small, green or
brown, square or oblong? What sounds do you
hear? Do you detect any smells? Does any taste
come to mind? Any textures?
20. Writing Tips
Use present tense when describing the events in a novel
or film or story: “Katniss volunteers” or “Haymitch is
drinking heavily.”
Your thesis for this paper will be the transition sentence
from the event in The Hunger Games to your own
narrative event: “Katniss’s disgust for the extravagant
Capitol is similar to the disgust I felt for myself when I
listened to an account of one man’s visit to factories in
China.”
Use chronological order to tell your story.
Use past tense to describe the event(s) in your life: “I
was camping with my family up in Yosemite.”
21. HOMEWORK
Read: HG through chapter 9.
Post #5: finish and post your
in-class writing
1. Beginning with a
quotation/transitioning to your
remembered event.
2. Vivid presentation of a place:
Using sensory details: 643-648