Sunday, July 31, 2011

Please donate! We're SO CLOSE to reaching the total!

As the title states, we are extremely close to being able to buy all our books and having them in time to start the year. Due to a ridiculously awesome sale on Amazon, we need about $1200 LESS than we previously calculated. We still need about $1,000 though, so every donation helps us get twice as close!

Right now, $4 will buy a book, so if you like the idea of how many books rather than how much money, think if it this way: $20 will buy us FIVE books. That's TWICE as many as the regular retail price!

Even if you have already donated or are unable to, you can still repost or share this blog with other folks you know. Spread the word and help up reach our goal!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Hunger Games Fireside Chat Episode 16

Exciting news! I will be a guest on the chat tonight, July 19, at 7:00 pm PST. The hosts, Savanna and Adam, have been kind enough to invite me on the program to speak about our Hunger Games Project at MHS. They usually open with a news segment, which is when I will be sharing a bit of background about how the project was conceived, some of our reasons for choosing The Hunger Games to work with, and a few ideas we have for the project. We're definitely hoping to inspire folks to help us fund the project. We still need quite a bit of money and we're less than a month from the start of school (August 16). Thanks to everyone for their support so far, and please enjoy the chat tonight!

You can listen live at this link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/firesidechat

For more information about the podcast in general, you can go here.

~Kristin

Friday, July 1, 2011

Our Objectives

A few folks have been interested in our specific goals and objectives, the big ideas that we will be focusing on during our unit on The Hunger Games. A few of us met recently to put some of these ideas down on paper, so to speak.

My original post focused mainly on the social and community-building objectives. As I mentioned there, we really want to create a genuine sense of community among the students and get them to see each other beyond surface impressions. We also want them to work with a variety of their classmates, not just those they seek out as being like themselves.

In addition to these few community-building goals, here is a bulleted list of some other themes, topics, and ideas that will be part of the project:

  • Examining social classes and poverty
  • Does "the land of the free" truly exist?
  • What does it take to survive? How do ordinary people survive in extraordinary circumstances? How does a person go from barely surviving to becoming a revolutionary?
  • The hero's journey - learning to trust, being vulnerable, facing danger, risking for others
  • The effects of death and war on children
  • Reality television - is it entertainment? 
  • Surveillance & "Big Brother"
With each of these ideas, we will not only analyze and examine how it present in the novel but also make connections to students' lives and the world we live in now.