Learning to Give, Curriculum Division of The LEAGUE
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Purpose:
Duration:
Three Forty to Forty-Five Minute Class Periods
Objectives:
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.
Materials:
- Access to Internet
- Attachment One: Recent Studies on Hunger in the United States. Reading from www.frac.org (Food Research and Action Center) on hunger in the United States.
Instructional Procedure(s):
- Anticipatory Set:
Teacher asks the learners "What is a need? You find yourself saying 'I need…' What are those things?" 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 Attachment One: Recent Studies on Hunger in the United States, 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. Research on Hurricane Andrew gives excellent background to US response to natural disaster and the role of FEMA (with both praise and severe criticism).
- Discuss philanthropic aid during the crisis (e.g., Red Cross and grassroots fundraising activities).
- 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.
Assessment:
- Teacher constructed quiz, test on content.
- Journal of research activities.
- Completed School/Home Connection.
- Completed chart of philanthropy.
- Evaluation of their technical report or map project.
- Teacher observation.
- Class participation in discussions.
Learners will take the point of view of a person who is hungry. This "person" should be thought of as someone who does not have access to an unlimited food supply on a daily basis. Learners can put themselves in the place of a starving child or a person who is homeless and has limited resources. Before you begin, you may even have a discussion on the differences between hunger and starvation.
Learners are to take a blank sheet of paper. With the paper horizontally, learners will fold it from left to right to form a book. On the outside of the paper, the cover of the book, the learners are to draw a picture of the person who is hungry. Keep in mind this person does not have to look any different than you or me. After learners complete that step, they are to open the book as if they were opening that person's mind. Inside the person's mind, learners are to write or draw four to five thoughts or feelings about his/her mind, body or spirit as it is affected by the lack of food.
Learners should next write a paragraph about their drawing. What made them choose the person they chose to draw, why did they choose to represent certain ideas, thoughts and feelings in the person's mind, and explain any drawings that may serve as abstract representations. The activity should be graded based on the four to five thoughts or feelings represented in the mind of the person as well as the paragraph explanation of why the learners chose the specific thoughts or feelings.
School/Home Connection:
- 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.
Extension:
Invite a nutritionist to speak to the class about daily nutritional needs of children to be successful in school.
Invite a representative from the FIA (Family Independence Agency) or WIC (Women, Infants and Children) to speak to the class.
Bibliographical References:
- 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.
Lesson Developed and Piloted by:
Kristen RudloskyKenston Local Schools
Kenston High School
Chagrin Falls, OH 44023
Handouts:
Handout 1Print Handout 1
Recent Studies on Hunger in the United States
Reading from www.frac.org
(Food Research and Action Center)
Even in the midst of a long period of economic growth, hunger remains a widespread problem in America. Recently published national studies show four million or more children and many millions of adults suffering from hunger. These studies are based on surveys that are a couple of years old, but if analyses from America's major providers of emergency food are a guide, their recent experience suggests hunger has not declined and may have increased compared to prior years. Since the incomes of the lowest income, one-fifth of Americans have yet to return to the levels they were at before the last recession, the continuing breadth and depth of hunger in the midst of this prosperity are more understandable. Moreover, two recent studies by physicians of four states may be early indicators of increased hunger among people whose food stamps were eliminated or reduced as a result of welfare reform.
I. Hunger
Household Food Security in the United States, 1995-1998
On July 14, 1999, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released national data that track the prevalence of food insecurity and hunger in the United States in 1996, 1997, and 1998. Previously, USDA had released the 1995 data. The data are derived from the annual Food Security Supplement, a questionnaire that is part of the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Bureau of Census. Based on the Census Bureau survey, USDA estimates that in 1998, 10.5 million U.S. households were food insecure, meaning that they did not have access to enough food to meet their basic needs. This adds up to 10.2 percent of all households in the U.S. About 31 million people lived in these households, including 19 million adults and 12 million children. (Children made up 40 percent of the total number of food insecure individuals). This number is up by 3 million adults and 2 million children from 1997.
Among these food insecure households, 3.7 million reached a level of food insecurity in 1998 that was great enough to cause one or more members of their household to be hungry due to inadequate resources for food. This meant that 6.1 million adults and 3.3 million children lived in households suffering outright from hunger in 1998.
Trends. The trend from 1995 to 1998 shows that food insecurity went down significantly from 1995 to 1997 - from 10.3 percent of all households being hungry or food insecure in 1995 to 8.7 percent in 1997, a difference of 1.4 million households. This meant that in 1997 there were 2.4 million fewer food insecure adults and 1.9 million fewer hungry and food insecure children than in 1995. However, from 1997 to 1998, there was a sharp increase in hunger and food insecurity - 3 million more adults and 2 million more children.
High Risk Groups and Areas Children were more likely to be food insecure than adults (19.7 percent versus 11.3 percent). Households with children experienced food insecurity at more than double the rate of households without children (15.2 percent versus 7.2 percent). Single woman-headed households with children had a food insecurity rate of 31.9 percent, three times that of married couple families (9.6 percent).
Hispanic and Black Non-Hispanic households (21.8 percent and 20.7 percent respectively) had three times the food insecurity rate of White Non-Hispanic households (7.1 percent). More than one-third (35.4 percent) of the households with incomes under the poverty level were food-insecure, while only 3.7 percent of households with incomes at or above 185 percent of poverty suffered from food insecurity.
The prevalence of food insecurity in central cities (14.2 percent) and rural areas (10.6 percent) was greater than in suburban areas (7.6 percent). Regionally, the South and West have higher food insecurity rates (11.1 and 12.2 percent respectively) than the Midwest (7.7 percent) and the Northeast (9.1 percent).
Significance of the Food Insecurity Numbers Food security, the assured access to enough food for an active, healthy life, is a key indicator of individual and family well-being. Food insecurity has negative health, educational, and developmental consequences, and adds immeasurably to the daily psychological stress felt by individuals and families with limited financial resources.
This is the first time in the history of U.S. nutrition surveillance that we have a carefully developed and thoroughly tested tool for monitoring food insecurity and hunger over time, in the U.S. population as a whole as well as among potentially vulnerable groups. The story the numbers tell should act as a warning signal that in spite of a booming economy there are millions among us who still cannot meet their most basic needs - sufficient food to lead a healthy life.
Unit Contents:
Overview:Philanthropy, Volunteering and Service: The Historical Connections Summary
Lessons:
- 1.
- Hmmm—What is Philanthropy?
- 2.
- Hunger Hurts
- 3.
- Philanthropy and the Great Society What Can We Do Today?
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