Learners will explore the human need for food and how it relates to hunger in the community and the world. Learners will propose alternative solutions through historical cases and current programs within their community. Learners will develop an awareness of and sensitivity to hunger issues in their community and world.

The learner will:

• categorize human needs and wants.
• define needs and wants in his/her own words.
• analyze the personal effects of hunger.
• relate issues of hunger to health and learning concerns.
• discuss the role of philanthropy in helping alleviate hunger in the community and the world.
• locate services available to the hungry in his/her community and the world.
• demonstrate knowledge about the connection of hunger to organisms causing diseases.

Anticipatory Set:


Teacher asks the learners "What is a need? When you find yourself saying 'I need…' What are those things that finish that sentence?" Learners can brainstorm examples of needs and then come up with a definition of a "need" in their own words. Next, "What are wants?" Take learners through the same brainstorming process. Learners can make personal lists of needs and wants or you can make a column chart representational of the entire class. Student definitions should also be recorded in some way. With the assumption that learners will state food and water as a basic need, pose the question "What if we have an absence of food? What happens? What is that called?" The learners will answer "HUNGER" and develop a definition of hunger that speaks to long-term lack of food, starvation, and develop causes to include poverty, famine, unemployment, and poor nutrition.

Divide the class into groups of three or four learners.

• Each group creates a web, with the word "hunger" in the middle of the web, with lines extending from the center. Learners are to brainstorm what hunger feels like, looks like and sounds like. Learners may add the effects hunger has on schoolwork, health, personal life, mood or even the psychological implications of hunger. Learners may fill out the web based on personal knowledge or knowledge gained from media or movies.
• An elected reporter from each peer group shares answers with the entire class.
• The instructor places a class web on the board where group responses are compiled by the teacher or by a recorder.
• Teacher facilitates discussion of unusual responses and common responses as a group.
• Have each learner keep a journal recording daily activities, logging each vocabulary term associated with philanthropy, and showing that he/she used it that day.
• Hand out copies of facts about hunger (see Materials), allowing seven to ten minutes for the learners to read. Discuss their feelings and get reactions to the reading.
• Do they believe this nation should have a hunger issue?
• Connect human diseases to hunger and poverty.
• Discuss the relationship of geography to hunger and major natural changes/floods, drought.
• Discover philanthropic actions in reaction to natural or human disasters, war, terrorism.
• Research the Emergency Preparedness Act and FEMA to examine the US response to natural disasters and the role of FEMA. Discuss philanthropic aid during the crisis (How do people and organizations respond and why).
• Discover and evaluate a governmental program addressing hunger as to its intended purpose and actual outcomes.
• Learners will research issues of hunger
  • in their own community by contacting faith based organizations, food banks, and homeless shelters in the community.
    Or
     
  • in the world through Internet search.
• Learners will write: Either

  
  A technical report on one of the above describing its history, the needs it meets, clientele, costs, fund raising, community usage, amounts distributed, current needs, special issues.
   

  Or

  
  A technical report on an issue relating to poverty: diseases directly associated with hunger in today's world such as Afghanistan or Somalia but not limited to those two areas.
   

  Or

  
  Create a large map of their community or the world, locating agencies that supply help to the hungry in their community with a key that lists services, hours of operations qualifications for people to obtain help, staffing, funding sources, how someone who wants to help can help.

 

• Ask learners if the family did not have enough money to eat healthy foods from the grocery store such as vegetables, what other method could be used to obtain those foods? This question may prompt the idea of growing your own vegetables in season.
• Ask learners whose family does plant a vegetable garden, what they plant and estimate the yield their family gets.
• Learners will look in their kitchens at home and make a list of foods they would consume in one day that would provide all their daily nutritional requirements.

• www.igc.apc.org. (Institute for Global Communications gateway).
• www.foodfirst.org . Food First is a nonprofit, research think tank and education-for-action center identifying the root causes and solutions to hunger and poverty, with a commitment to food as a human right.
• www.unicef.org. (United Nations Children's Fund).Premier United Nations agency providing medical, educational and food to children of the world. Some of your learners may have already participated in Halloween fund raising for UNICEF.
• www.worldhunger.org Information on areas of the world currently experiencing hunger issues.
• www.csmonitor.com. The Christian Science Monitor has many articles relating to issues of hunger in the United States and the world.
• www.strength.org. (Share Our Strength). Nonprofit organization which mobilizes individuals and businesses to fight hunger.