World Food Day falls on Oct. 16 (Sunday) this year. It is a worldwide event intended to increase awareness, understanding and informed year-round action to fight hunger around the world.

For today’s lesson, as we did recently with the Global Nomads Group for a lesson about the famine in Somalia, we collaborated with the United Nations World Food Programme, a humanitarian organization that fights hunger worldwide.

In honor of World Food Day, we invite you to explore with us and the program the scope and impact of childhood hunger around the world.

Overview | In this lesson, developed in recognition of World Food Day, students consider the definition of hunger and where and how hunger most affects people, including children. They then consider the fact that hunger is “solvable” and create action plans to inform and engage their communities.

Materials | Computer with Internet access and projector (optional)

Warm-Up | Write the word “hunger” on the board and invite students to share whatever comes to mind – adjectives, places, ideas, etc. Create a list or word web on the board as students contribute ideas.

Then work as a class to develop a one-sentence definition for hunger using these shared ideas. The definition should try to address what hunger is, who it affects and why it occurs.

Next, project on a screen or provide print copies of the World Food Programme’s 2011 Hunger Map (PDF).

Guide students to use the key to explore where hunger is a serious problem around the world. Does anything on the map surprise them? For example, what do they think about the fact that there are more hungry people in Asia than in Africa?

On the board, write “global” in front of “hunger.” Ask: How does adding the word “global” change your sense of the word “hunger”? What does it mean for the world that hunger happens on a global scale?

Shift gears slightly and ask students to imagine what it is like for a child living in a country where people are suffering from hunger. Tell them that to get them thinking about childhood, they should write the following sentences in their notebooks and fill in the blanks:

When I was 10 years old, I wanted to be __________.

Three things that helped me, or could have helped me, work toward this goal were: __________, __________ and __________.

Invite students to share their childhood dreams and support systems, which may include helpful family members and and teachers and access to various kinds of resources. They can also share their dreams on the World Food Programme’s Feed a Child, Feed a Dream Web page.

Tell them that they will now start to find out more about the impact that hunger can have on a child and how it can affect everything from daily life to dreams and aspirations.

Related | In September, the Sunday Review ran the Op-Ed article, “Remembering a Hungry Childhood,” by a farmer in Kenya who shares his experience of hunger:

Droughts are cyclical in Kenya. Before, they came every 10 years, but now they seem to be hitting us more often and for longer periods of time. My community remembers events and birthdays by times of hunger. We give the droughts names: “longoza” was the drought when many animals died; there was the drought of the “planes” because food was dropped from the air by planes, and one particularly bad drought was called “man who dies with money in his fist,” because, even if there was money, there was simply no food to purchase.

I was born in 1951 in Machakos. From what my mother tells me, that year there was a serious drought. My sister was born in 1961, and I clearly remember the terrible weather and the prevailing hunger throughout the region. I can’t tell you how many times I went to bed without eating. “I slept like that,” is how we described it, which means we went to bed with nothing to eat. I can’t count the number of days when “I slept like that,” or describe the feeling of going to sleep hungry knowing I’d wake up and there would still be no food for breakfast.

Read the entire Op-Ed piece with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

1. Where is Kenya on the World Food Programme global hunger map? What do you know about Kenya by looking at this map?
2. What did “I slept like that” mean to Mr. Kimeu as a child?
3. How does he describe the physical feeling of hunger?
4. What is the “ripple effect” Mr. Kimeu describes?
5. What did his parents try to do to feed their family?

Activity | Have students return to the dream they had at age 10. How would living in hunger “like that” have shaped their aspirations and ability to pursue them? What can be done to help hungry children today?

Remind students of Mr. Kimeu’s line “Hunger is an unforgivable disease because it is the easiest one to cure.” On the board, write “curable” amid the other adjectives from the brainstorm about hunger. Then erase the other adjectives, leaving only “curable.” Ask: What does it mean that hunger is curable? What are the causes of hunger? What interventions can solve it? As students brainstorm ideas, write them on the board.

Introduce some ways food aid is provided by organizations like WFP, including its school mealsprogram, explained in the “Two Minutes to Learn About: School Meals” fact sheet (PDF).

To focus more on children with hunger, students can watch some of the World Food Programme’s World Food Day Videos (available by clicking on the red cups on the interactive map), which feature children around the world who participate in the school meals program. Ask: How do the children in the videos remind you of yourselves? How do they remind you of Mr. Kimeu’s story? What differences did you notice? How do the children in these videos fit into your original idea of hunger from the beginning of class? How do they alter it? What can children do differently when they don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from?

Finally, pull up the interactive map and invite students to compare this map with the map of hunger in the world. How do the two maps give them a different sense and definition of hunger? Does seeing the children in the school meals program change their understanding of global hunger?

To conclude, return to the idea that hunger is solvable. Do students think that most people know that? Do they think this would change how people get involved on the issue? How might they help educate others about global hunger and engage them in being part of a solution?

Going Further | If desired, encourage students to create an action plan to address hunger.

They can begin by working individually or in pairs to create a campaign to raise awareness in their school about childhood hunger, perhaps around World Food Day. For example, they can host a school vocabulary tournament using Freerice.com, a World Food Programme online trivia game that donates actual grains of rice to hungry kids for every answer that online players get right.

The class may wish to focus on global hunger (perhaps centering on a specific crisis like the one in the Horn of Africa) or on hunger around the United States or even in their own communities. For example, in keeping with the topic of high food prices, one of the themes of this year’s World Food Day, they can use the World Food Programme’s Food Price Roller Coaster infographic to inform the school community about what rising food prices mean to local families living below the poverty line.

Economics students might explore how far a dollar – what the average Kenyan lives on – stretches in a Nairobi market with the World Food Programme’s “Dollar a Day in Kenya” video. They can then investigate how far a dollar goes in other places where poverty and hunger are serious problems and make and share their own videos.

If students want to develop a virtual component to their campaigns, they can use social media like Facebook and Twitter to inform and engage students and the rest of the school community. An online campaign can include posting Facebook status updates about making a personal commitment to fighting hunger, sharing New York Times articles and photographs and World Food Programme fact sheets and other materials, like the video “Nutrition in Two Minutes.”

Students can share their online campaigns with WFP and The Learning Network on Twitter (@WFP_Students,@NYTimesLearning) and Facebook (Facebook.com/WFPStudents, Facebook.com/NYTimesLearning).

Students may also choose to enact a service learning or community service project.

Standards | This lesson is correlated to McREL’s national standards (it can also be aligned to the new Common Core State Standards):

Economics
1. Understands that scarcity of productive resources requires choices that generate opportunity costs.
10. Understands basic concepts about international economics.

Geography
1. Understands the characteristics and uses of maps, globes, and other geographic tools and technologies.
3. Understands the characteristics and uses of spatial organization of Earth’s surface.
4. Understands the physical and human characteristics of place.
11. Understands the patterns and networks of economic interdependence on Earth’s surface.
16. Understands the changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution and importance of resources.