Hello Parents!
I wanted to give you a brief look into my English I classroom. Your students have just recently finished reading Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Instead of performing a formal assessment through short answer, multiple-choice, and true and false statements, we took the opportunity to allow students to be assessed in another way.
Your English I student worked in a collaborative setting to complete what we sometimes refer to as a Body Biography. The purpose of this is to analyze a character from Hunger Games in extensive detail. Each student worked in a group setting and each group was assigned a character from the book. After having been assigned a character, groups then drew out the shape of a body on a long piece of paper roughly 6-8 feet long. Some of the groups chose to do this by lying down on the paper and having a silhouette traced; while still others chose to freehand the silhouette shape.
Upon completion of the shape, groups then worked together to complete a deep dive into that character’s innermost motivations. They depicted the character artistically with at least 3 physical traits that were mentioned in the novel. Near the eyes of the character, they discussed what that character’s focus was and what the character saw. Near the heart, they determined what that character loved the most and what symbols could be included to represent that love. Near the spine or backbone, they discussed the character’s most important goal, what drove their thoughts and actions, what motivated them most, and what gave them strength. Near the hands, the groups attempted to describe what the character held in their hands both literally and figuratively. The feet were representative of what foundation the character had and what the character’s beliefs were. There was to be a section for the “Background” a character had as well that was made up of the character’s environment (new or old).
In addition to this, groups had to write somewhere on the poster the virtues and vices of their character and an original text that helped a view understand the character (like a character poem).
The groups worked tirelessly on these projects for nearly a week; as you can imagine, it’s a lot of coloring. Some students even got creative with Peeta Mellark’s character. Instead of only utilizing one medium (colored pencils), they added leaves to represent the moment in the book where Peeta is camouflaged to survive toward the end of the games. Some groups focused more heavily on symbolism. Some groups were hyper specific about their original texts. Whatever their focus, they all achieved some beautiful artwork and looked at characters in a new light and with greater understanding for their motivations within the novel.
END
Mrs. Martin
