May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor: A Hunger Games Unit Study

What is more middle school than finally being able to read The Hunger Games? At least that is how it is around here.

This summer, my kids and I are exploring a different theme each week that they pick out. This past week was The Hunger Games week! There are so many fascinating topics that can be explored based on events in the story - as apparent by our book list. Best of all, reading The Hunger Games seemed to get the kids more interested in reading more novels. Here are some of the things we did this week:

Reading

Note: We had already read the trilogy leading up to this week. Here are some related books we found at the library:

• Survivor Kid: A practical guide to wilderness survival

• Archery

• Bishop Takes Queen

• Longbow Girl

• Braids & Buns, Ponies & Pigtails: 50 hairstyles every girl will love

• Killer Bees

• Let’s Bake Bread! A family cookbook

• Cool Quick Breads: Easy recipes for kids to bake

• A Kid’s Guide to Birds of California

• Birds of California Field Guide

• Knot It! (a book that teaches how to tie different kinds of knots)

• The Kids’ Guide to First Aid

Activities

• Nerf bow & arrow (practice hitting a target)

• Parachute design

• Write your own ending to the story

• Design your own book cover

• Watch the movies for the trilogy

• Snap circuits (due to the part where they connect wires to the tree to harness the electricity of lightning - maybe a bit of a stretch!)

• Bake bread

• Face painting

• Try goat milk

Benefits

The kids really enjoyed these books and activities! I think having experience with so many different non-fiction books was beneficial. They became a little more open to non-fiction when we did the cat unit, but this really opened them up to a larger range to topics.

The parachute design project was actually my daughter’s idea! You may know in The Hunger Games the contestants sometimes receive help from viewers via little parachutes that drop down from the sky. I did not give the kids any instructions other than to make a parachute. They were quite creative! They had done many engineering design projects before, so they knew how to gather materials, create something, and then improve their designs.

Overall, I saw the benefits of basing a unit study on a book. There are just so many tangents and rabbit trails to go down inspired by the story!