LESSON: Social networking profiles for literature

Hello! I’d like to share a really cool book club activity I did last week with 5^th- and 6^th graders. (It was an optional club activity, but it could very easily be done as a full-class assignment or a choice on a list of types of “book reports” students could choose.)

This idea was inspired by someone on a school library teachers' listserv; this fabulous person (whose name I can’t remember) mentioned My Fake Wall. I went to the site and laughed super hard at the fake profiles of Cinderella and Martin Luther. I wondered if we could use My Fake Wall for our Hunger Games book club lunch, but I wanted to minimize computer/food contact! I thought, what if we did this by hand? It wouldn’t be hard to come up w/ a fill-in-the-blank poster the kids could get creative with. So that’s how we did it. Obviously, you could modify this project in tons of different ways, but the basic idea is to create a social networking profile for a book character. (You could do it for the author potentially, too.) This was a very high-energy, idea-sparking book club meeting! We all had a great time. The characters we did profiles for were Katniss, Peeta, Gale, Pres. Snow, and Rue. I had to think hard to create a name for this social networking site... I finally game up with Gameface (a nod to Facebook and the Hunger Games themselves, with the added bonus of being a colloquialism for being very competitive and wanting to win).

I’ve attached photos of a blank poster (before the kids got their hands on it), some completed posters, and how we finally displayed them in the hall. Kids had the hardest time with the quote and the friends part, but it got them thinking critically about the characters and their relationships: Who would this character genuinely be likely to accept a friend request from on a social networking site? Who might they accept for political reasons or to keep an eye on? (I think “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” really applies to this particular book!)

If you have any questions about this activity, please let me know. I definitely recommend it for 6^th grade and up.

-Kelly L. Farrow

LRC Director

Fairmount School, Downers Grove Dist. 58