The document provides an agenda for a class discussion. It includes plans to discuss readings from The Hunger Games and present an essay assignment. Students will break into groups to discuss the characters in The Hunger Games and their experiences, as well as analyze writing strategies from homework posts. The class will then discuss two short stories and receive guidance on writing a draft essay about an impactful personal experience that relates to themes from The Hunger Games. The document outlines goals and strategies for crafting a strong introduction and vividly presenting the setting of the personal experience.

2. AGENDA
 Teams 2
 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. Get into new groups
of three or four.
(1-2 minutes)
Remember, turn in a point
sheet with the names of
everyone in your group
(first name, last initial) and
your accumulated points
for the day.
It is your responsibility to
make the sheet, track the
points, and turn it in.

4. 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?

5. In your groups, discuss your homework posts
concerning analyzing writing strategies
6-8 minutes.

6. Annie Dillard “An American
Childhood”

9. 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

11. 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.

12. 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. Generally, you shouldn’t start with the quotation but
rather work it in after a few sentences. You might introduce the
novel and the author and provide a bit of background about the
story.
 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).

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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?

17. 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.”

18. HOMEWORK
Read: SMG 643-648 “Using Sensory
Description”
Post #12:
1. Beginning with a
quotation/transitioning to your
remembered event. See slide 14
Post #13
2. Vivid presentation of a place. See
slide 16 and the reading for help.