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Tickets, please: plug in the DVD player—watching movies in class can improve kids' reading and writing skills in some surprising ways
Instructor, Sept, 2005 by Madeline Farbman
It's true. Movies are a great tool--and a great motivator--for the middle-school classroom, no matter what subject you teach. We all worry about our weaker readers. Showing films as a way to introduce or reinforce new material can help struggling readers gain a foothold and give more accomplished readers new ways to stay engaged. With reluctant readers especially, seeing a world or characters onscreen helps them to understand similar subjects in fiction or textbooks. "When students reencounter the same information in a new media, they start to get a feeling of expertise," says Stanlee Brimberg, a New York City teacher who introduces his Civil War unit by showing clips from Edward Zwick's 1989 film Glory about African-American soldiers. "It helps the kids understand and relate to history," says Brimberg.
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At the same time, many teachers find that viewing movies in an academic context can help children become more media-savvy. For example, they can start to understand how films evoke and manage our emotions through music and editing. They can observe the differences between the world inside a Hollywood film and outside it. Plus, many films offer some great possibilities for high-interest science and math lessons. Harry Potter science, anyone?
Read on for fresh teacher-tested tips on using movies in class. Best of all, these ideas use short clips, so you can avoid the old question of how many periods it takes to show Roots.
Show the Movie First
Some struggling readers have difficulty forming pictures in their head as they read. But watching a movie can give students a visual image of a Civil War battle or a character in a book, which helps the words on the page make sense. "Children are always more willing and more interested in reading something they already know about and understand," says Jeffrey Wilhelm, author of Reading is Seeing (Scholastic, 2004).
Try showing a five- or 10-minute clip of a historical film before studying that era, or watch a scene from one of the film versions of Romeo and Juliet before reading it in class. Have children take notes, and then when you move onto the text, refer back to the visual images.
Use a Storyboard
When Linda Rief's eighth graders watch The Wave, a movie about children caught up in an experiment that echoes the rise of Nazism, she has them create a simple storyboard following one character. They use stick figures and key words to track their characters' interactions. The simple format helps students break down the plot and connect action to character development. "I have kids who studied the same character discuss how that person could have acted differently--both in the movie and in Nazi Germany," says Rief, a former New Hampshire English Teacher of the Year.
Rief also has her students storyboard short stories to identify character and plot development in writing. You can find a free storyboard at www.schoolhousevideo.org/pages/storyboard.pdf.
Script It Out
Terry Bigelow, co-author of What Choice Do I Have?: Reading, Writing, and Speaking Activities to Empower Students (Heinemann, 2005), has his eighth-grade language arts students write their own scripts. "I've found that eighth graders, and middle-school writers in general, tend to have some weakness when it comes to developing character, understanding setting, and writing dialogue," Bigelow says. "Script-writing forces them to really focus on those aspects of writing."
When Bigelow shows movie clips, he gives students a few pages of the accompanying script. He often shows a sequence from the 1999 hit movie The Mummy, because its scenes have plenty of stage directions and character descriptions. "When they can see the writing it took to make the action occur on the screen--that makes a huge connection," he says. Free scripts are available at www.script-o-rama.com, and you can also purchase many popular movie scripts at www.amazon.com.
Break It Down
Teaching kids about filmmaking helps them understand what they see on the big screen, the small screen, the computer screen--and even on the page. And learning about lighting and framing starts before you cue up the DVD player.
When Dawn Sahouani student-taught a sixth-grade film unit she had designed, she had her kids bring in photos from magazines to study camera angles. The students learned what it means when the camera peers down at a stressed character from an ominously high position, or angles up from down low at someone powerful. Once kids understand basic techniques, you can encourage them to get deeper into their reading as they consider, "What's going on here? How might this moment be shown in a movie?" The same techniques apply to other media, and knowing them helps kids understand--and be savvier about--television and advertising.
Check out Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom, by John Golden (NCTE, 2001) or Reel Conversations: Reading Films with Young Adults, by Alan B. Teasley (Boynton/Cook, 1996) for tips on the basics of teaching and studying film.
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