EWRT 1A CLASS 5

AGENDAFreewrite: Setting Goals

Vocabulary Test: (Chapters 1-4)

The Hunger Games: Themes and Concepts

Discussion:

A Well-Told Story Sentence length.

Constructing an action sequence

Reflecting on the Event's Significance pp. 48-49

In-Class Writing1. Focus on the climax of your event. Write a paragraph describing the action using short and long

sentences to control the intensity of your narrative.

2. Recalling Your Remembered Feelings and Thoughts

3. Exploring Your Present Perspective

4. Formulating a Tentative Thesis Statement

VOCABULARY TEST

The test covers the words from Chapters 1-4.

You will have 15 minutes to complete the test.

There are 20 words.

In your groups

Take five minutes to discuss the various themes and concepts that appear in The Hunger Games.

Try to identify particular passages from the text that support your assertions

DISCUSSION: THEMES AND CONCEPTS

FRIENDSHIP

FAMILY

SURVIVAL

FREEDOM AND OPPRESSION

MATERIALSIM AND CLASS

???

A Sentence Strategy

Essay #2: A Well Told

Story

Br

Briefly identify the five parts of your essay

• A Well-told storyTo create suspense,, Wolff uses a combination of short and long sentences. Reread this paragraph and consider how they work here.

Discussion Groups:

Building Suspense

Work with the excerpt on the handout to identify how

sentence length, narrative action, and prepositional

phrases work to heighten suspense.

Use Sentence Length to Control the Tension in your story

1. Focus on the climax of your event. Write a paragraph describing the action using short and long sentences to control the intensity of your narrative.

Reflecting on the Event's

Significance pp. 48-49

Show that the event was important

• Dramatize the event so readers can understand your feelings about it.

• Show scenes from your point of view so readers can identify with you.

Tell us that the event was important

• Tell how you felt at the time of the experience

• Tell how you feel about it now, in reflection.

The Goal: Indicate the Event’s Significance

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.

The Strategy: Recall Remembered Feelings and Thoughts: Answer These Questions:

1. What were your expectations before the event?

2. What was your first reaction to the event as it was happening and right after it ended?

3. How did you show your feelings? What did you say?

4. What did you want the people involved to think of you? Why did you care what they thought of you?

5. What did you think of yourself at the time?

6. How long did these initial feelings last?

7. What were the immediate consequences of the event for you personally?

Pause now to reread what you have written. Then write another sentence or two about the event’s significance to you at the time it occurred.

The Strategy Continued: Explore Your Present Perspective1. Looking back, how do you feel about this event? If you

understand it differently now than you did then, what is the difference?

2. What do your actions at the time of the event say about the kind of person you were then? How would you respond to the same event if it occurred today?

3. Can looking at the event historically or culturally help explain what happened? For example, did you upset racial, gender, or religious expectations? Did you feel torn between identities or cultures? Did you feel out of place?

4. Do you see now that there was a conflict underlying the event? For example, were you struggling with contradictory desires? Did you feel pressured by others? Were you desires and rights in conflict with someone else’s? Was the event about power or responsibility.

5. Pause to reflect on what you have written about your present perspective. Then write another sentence or two, commenting on the event’s significance as you look back on it

Emphasizing the significance of your event

Readers do not expect you to begin your narrative essay with the kind of explicit thesis statement typical of argumentative or explanatory writing. If you do decide to tell readers explicitly why the event was meaningful or significant, you will most likely do so as you tell the story, by commenting on or evaluating what happened, instead of announcing the significance at the beginning. Keep in mind that you are not obliged to tell readers the significance, but you must show it through the way you tell the story.

The Strategy

Review what you wrote for Reflecting on the Event’s Significance, and add another two or three sentences, not necessarily summarizing what you already have written but extending your insights into the significance of the event, what it meant to you at the time, and what it means to you now.

HOMEWORKRead: HG through chapter 12. SMG p 37 “Commentary: Autobiographical Significance,” and 625-633.

Post #5: Post your draft: Long quote; transition; thesis; intro to event, description of place(s), description of people, a dialogue or two, the climax (with short and long sentences working to achieve your goal), and a paragraph that speaks to the significance or your event (use the list of answers to the questions on slide #10 and #11); end with framing plan.

Study: Vocab 5-7

Bring: HG and SMG; A copy of post #5