Tomorrow’s the big day! Are you excited? Going to a midnight release?!
Once you’ve calmed down a bit, you can put your creative energies to good use with our essay prompts and project ideas. Teachers — feel free to use any of these! (But if you do, let us know so we can feature your work!)
Essay Ideas:
- It’s hard, but try to see things from President Snow’s perspective. Why would he seek to control the districts so strictly? Why does he see Katniss as such a threat? Write a speech in Snow’s voice, addressing the districts.
- TGH is an example of dystopian literature. What other dystopian titles have you read? What are the similarities and differences? Do they have a common theme?
- If you look at lists of dystopian literature, you can see a clear pattern — it has increased dramatically in the last few decades. Why is this?
- Allegory: a narrative having a second meaning beneath the surface one – a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a
symbolic meaning. That said, how is THG an allegory? What is the symbolic meaning?
Projects:
- Create a diorama of one of the game areas based on facts from The Hunger Games or Catching Fire.
- Create a scrapbook/journal from the point of view of Prim as she watches The Hunger Games from home. Think about what she might have collected, drawn, written, etc.
- Channel your inner Cinna: Design a tribute costume for a district other than District 12. Describe why your costume applies, much how Cinna did when he dressed Katniss and Peeta for their first Hunger Games.
- Dramatic dialogue: Create a dialogue between Katniss and her father. Imagine her father did not die in the mines, but instead was alive and escaped to District 13. Pretend the mine collapse was a cover-up created by the Capitol to hide the impending revolution. Bonus points for acting out and filming this scene.
- Revolt behind the scenes: Design your strategy behind the revolt against the Capitol. Include characters from the books and what their parts will be. Include a map and time line. Keep the Districts in mind while you plan, and be sure to apply what you know about them to your successful revolution against the Capitol.
Novel Novice 
Thank you! I love the project ideas! My students are reading The Hunger Games in my classroom & look forward to using these ideas.
These are all great ideas! When I taught the Hunger Games, we studied real-life rebels. First, we looked at these elements of dystopia: pollution, violence, totalitarian government, disease, poverty, lack of freedom, and issues with too much or too little technology.
After talking about which of these elements were present in the Hunger Games, we looked at individuals like Muhammad Ali, Rachel Carson, Noam Chomsky, Suu Ky, Che Guevara, and many others to see what aspects of our society the rebels take issue with.
It was a great unit–I’m definitely going to teach it again!
I just had a student suggest using the Hunger Games in class. I am a social studies teacher and I was wondering how can I approach it from that angle?
Social Studies topics: Examples of a command economy; examples of violations of the Bill of Rights; Development of a Bill of Rights based on treatment of people by the government then compare this to the US Bill of Rights; find examples in current countries of abuses/economies illustrated in the novel (Taiwan/China; North/South Korea – District 13)