Drama activities involve assuming the role of a character from a story and exploring how that character might react in a new situation. In the case of “Last Boy,” students could assume the identity of any character, survivor or not, and then split up into small groups to see how the characters might act and react in a doomsday survival situation, much like Ben does. Students should start out by journaling their thoughts about surviving from the perspective of their chosen character about. They can then discuss their journals with another student who will also be in character. Student pairs can then form larger groups and discuss how the new group might work together to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. These final discussions can then be debated as a whole group to see what groups would have the best chance for survival.
Jigsaw discussions require students to break up into four to six small discussion groups and discuss a specific prompt. Each group discusses a different prompt. After a certain amount of time, one member from each group cycles to a new group, and each member of this new group first reports out on their previous discussion before discussing a new prompt, and so on. For “The Last Boy,” students could discuss topics such as family relationships and ethics, doomsday and its effects (physical and psychological), running away, the ethics of survival, individual rights vs. group survival, group dynamics, cooperation and teamwork, and so on. Students might also be tasked with generating their own discussion topics prior to the jigsaw discussion.
By mimicking the style of “The Last Boy” through diary writing, students could reflect on their daily activities in much the same way that Ben does. Students could be asked to either keep a truthful diary based on their own experiences, or else adopt the persona of one of the characters from the book and keep a journal from that character’s perspective. Students could then share their whole diaries or excerpts from their diaries and discuss how both the content, as well as how diary writing affected their thinking about certain topics.
Colbert’s “The Last Boy” is one of many works in the literary genre of utopian/dystopian fiction. Students can review the elements of this genre, as well as exemplary works such as George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” or Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale.” They could then compare and contrast the themes and ideas from “The Last Boy” with the themes and ideas from these other works, or with the themes and ideas from the utopian/dystopian fiction genre as a whole. Students could also discuss why such fiction tends to be popular, particularly with young adults, and could conclude by discussing what “The Last Boy” might teach us about our lives today.