From left, Sienna Float, Chris Morehead, Alexandria Bennett and Brittany Katona work on a project for their lessons on The Hunger Games at Pickerington’s Ridgeview Junior High.

Alexandria Bennett already had read The Hunger Games and wasn’t too excited when she learned that she’d have to study the novel in her seventh-grade, honors language-arts class this year.

But the group discussions, class debates and projects have opened her eyes to much more about the book, including its use of symbolism, the political commentary in the portrayal of a totalitarian government and the connections between today’s world and the controlled state the characters live in.

“I found out things I didn’t figure out the first time I read it,” said Bennett, 13, who attends Pickerington’s Ridgeview Junior High School.

Many middle-school teachers are using The Hunger Games in their classrooms, drawing on the novel’s popularity to teach the literary concepts they cover every year.

Unlike the classics or other novels they have used in the past, teachers sayThe Hunger Games covers so much ground — good vs. evil, adventure, romance, cliff-hanging endings — that it has attracted all kinds of students, including reluctant readers and those who typically reject science fiction.

“When I have a kid who comes in the classroom and hates reading and hates language arts, and I see them with this book and not want to stop reading ... it is a very satisfying experience that this is something that brought these kids into the world of literature,” said Andrea Garnett, a seventh-grade language-arts teacher at Hilliard Heritage Middle School. The novel has been part of the district’s middle-school curriculum for four years.

Other teachers have picked up the novel this year because of the release ofThe Hunger Games movie that opens nationwide at midnight tonight. Several schools have scheduled class trips to watch the film on opening day. Students at Grandview Heights’ Edison Intermediate Middle School, for instance, will view it at the Grandview Theater during school hours on Friday.

Anna Soter, a professor of education at Ohio State University, said she hasn’t seen as many schools adopt a popular teen novel as they have done with Suzanne Collins’ best-seller, even though many well-written young-adult books have been published since the 1970s.

She said students have connected with the novel’s young heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where an oppressive government forces teenagers to fight to the death.

“If you want people to read enthusiastically and become readers, they have to see themselves in it,” Soter said. “You can easily see yourself in (The Hunger Games) as a teen.”

Teachers say it’s easier to help students analyze what’s beneath the surface of a story, such as plot, climax and conflict, when they are invested in the story.

Eileen Covell, who read The Hunger Games with her sixth-graders at Grandview Heights this year, had them discuss the role of violence in the book and how it moves the plot along.

Jocelyn Cosgrave, a sixth-grade language-arts teacher at Hannah Ashton Middle School in Reynoldsburg, said the book, though complex, can be understood by most students.

“It’s so difficult to find a mature theme for a lower reading level,” she said.

For example, students might be able to understand the conflict in Lord of the Flies, a classic 1954 novel with a similar theme, but could not read it independently, because of its higher-level vocabulary, she said.

cboss@dispatch.com