I ended
up using the trailer to The Hunger Games:
I then
put several stills from the movie on a slideshow as we listened to Taylor
Swift’s song from The Hunger Games’s soundtrack. I introduced them to the terms
of micro, meso, and macro but used the analogy of an onion for our setting with
layers. One of the students mentioned that we really were doing “world
building” in our minds as we begin a book and using the information an author
provides as parts of that world. With that idea, the students and I discussed
the images – where did they fit into our “onion” for The Hunger Games?
Then the talk turned to books we are reading currently and talked about what snippets
of information from the author helped us shape the worlds in our minds.
At the
end of the week I used the app Sonic Pics as one way to assess the knowledge
the students had gained about setting and building characters from last week. I
preloaded ten images onto each iPad. Working in partners or teams of three,
students selected one picture from the app. The group would study that picture
and build a world and story in their head that could apply. They recorded
themselves talking to the iPad for their selected image telling me details
like:
· When and where does this story
take place?
· What are the characters involved
in this story?
· What are their values?
· What relationships are important
to the story?
· What type of conflict would there
be?
The
students saved their project and then emailed it to my school email address. It
was fun to see the different images the kids picked and what stories they
dreamed up.
All in
all, I highly recommend Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements. I
feel that my students are thinking deeper than they were before in regard to
the books they are reading independently. I hope to see this continue in the
next few weeks as we explore Theme and Point of View.
