Cel IT™
Exploratory Learning Rooms
Teaching with Movies
Extension Activities:
Motivate Learning using Movies to
- Films engage students to use their higher level thinking skills and to
- Explore themes
- Explore new lands
- Experience the narrative through film
- Discovery and connect with the real world
- Experiment with film techniques to critical analyse
Resources
Check out these links to help
Enhancing the learning in your Classroom - Explore Teaching with Movies
- Use movies to teach a concept. Sometimes new ideas are absorbed better when they are told in an entertaining and visually stimulating manner. Pictures are worth a thousand words
- Introduce a movie as you would literature. Examining the storytelling devices and concepts of a movie of the plot. You can use a film as part of a thematic unit or a stand-alone lesson that takes much less time than reading an entire novel. Our students are digital kids.
- Discuss cinematic aspects of the movie. Ask them to consider casting, costuming, setting, sound, musical score, elements within a scene, and other directorial choices. Why does the camera zoom in at a particular moment? Why does an important scene take place off-camera? These kinds of exercises can be performed with entire films or select scenes carefully chosen to highlight specific techniques.
- Compare the book to the movie. Choose an especially scene, and deconstruct it in terms of film techniques.
- Some texts are difficult for young readers. Movie renditions can introduce and help students comprehend these works.
- Showing the film before reading the novel can help poor readers comprehend challenging texts boosting them to a higher level of critical thinking and language analysis.
English Lesson Plans from Movies:
History Lesson Plans from Movies:
Overview:
Teaching with Movies offers
- Lesson Plans for Studying Film as Text
- Easy to create lesson plans suitable for particular classes.
- Lesson plans can be easily adapted
- Learning Plans cover most areas of the K - 12 curriculum.
- In English classes lessons plans are based on studying Film as Text
- History Lesson plans help recreate the past
Here are some examples of lesson plans that can be developed from movies using Learning Plans from Film as Text at lynnevey.com
Caution:
Always preview movies before showing them to students; you don't want any unpleasant surprises.
If you do show a movie make sure you check the rating.
Most schools have their own Media Policy and it is usual practice to seek Parental approval.