Projects/Activities

Below are some ideas for projects/activities for you to complete after reading Unwind by Neal Shusterman.

• In the novel, Sonia, the owner of the antique shop, has each of the teens she helps write a letter to someone they love. Write your own letter to someone you love and, like the kids in the novel, put everything you want to say to that person, good and bad, in the letter. Would you be willing to show this letter to the person you wrote it to? Why or why not? What about in three or four years?
• Draw up a will; instead of possessions, it's your personality that you're giving away. List your personality traits. What parts of your personality (your sense of humor, your determination, etc.) would you give away, and to whom?
• Prepare testimony to Congress as they begin hearings on the status of the Bill of Life. Write your testimony from the point of view of a teen slated to be unwound or from someone whose life was saved by receiving body parts from an unwound teen. Hold hearings, where several students share their testimony with the class. Then debate whether the law should be changed or not.
• Risa's band plays "Don't Fear the Reaper," among other songs, for the teens who are going to be unwound. Put together a set list of songs your band would play if you were performing at a Harvest Camp. Explain your choices.
• In the novel, the characters arrive at "the graveyard," a safe refuge for teens facing unwinding. In a group, invent another location where teens have gathered. Describe how your own makeshift community functions, and what each of your jobs is. Create a list of ten rules for getting along, in the spirit of the Admiral's "Ten Demandments."
• Try telling a story in which every person, one after another, gets to donate only one sentence. The goal is not to throw the story off track, or to be funny, but to make the story coherent. Can it be done? Did the story make sense?
• Write a newspaper article dated one year after the end of the novel. What news event has just happened (for example, a new election, a riot, a new terrorist attack)?  Has it changed anything fundamental about the society or the Bill of Life?  Has the law been repealed?