Films for children, do we know how to use them?

Good afternoon to everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend.

For this week I would like to write a little bit about a new project that we have in this subject that I think we are all going to enjoy a lot. The project is about “Children’s literature workshops

The first thing that the teacher did to catch our attention about the topic was to tell us that we were going to work with children. This can sound strange, because we are going to be teachers and we will deal with them every day, but as we are still in University, I think that this point is very important.

The reason why I think so, is because we are doing a lot of projects or presentations in which we have to imagine that our audience are children, but to know that, in this case, this is going to be true, I think that catches even more our attention and that we take this project with more energy.

Secondly, Raquel showed us some trailers about the films we could choose to be the topic for our workshops. As I could see in class, we were all (or nearly all); very excited to see again some of the films that we watched when we were little children. The possibilities were: The Lord of the Rings, Mary Poppins, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Gulliver’s Travels and Snow White. At the end, Aladdin was the one who won.

I have to admit, that when the teacher told as that we all had to think about a different topics with the same film, I thought it would be a bit difficult. With this little sentence I would like to have a brief reflection: we you have to go deeper into the things that surround as, and not only what you can see with the naked eye. In this case it refers to see beyond in a film, but we can take this advice for a lot of situations in our daily life.

Later, we had time to reason about the specific topic we wanted to deal with. In my case, my group and I decided to make the workshop about “Life in the desert”. At the moment, we have a lot of ideas about how to make this very attractive for the children and, at the same time, that they learn a lot about the topic through a film that we all know.

I can not finish this post without saying that these kind of lessons give us a lot of opportunities to see more materials and resources that we can use in our future lessons, but also how to work with them correctly, which is also very important.

Thank you very much for reading my post and I wait for your comments and opinions!

2 thoughts on “Films for children, do we know how to use them?

  1. Hi Yolanda!!

    Firstly, I would like to say that I totally agree with you in the fact that we are really excited about working with children in a real situation, instead of just planning what we would do in a particular case or lesson. If everything goes as planned, we are going to learn and to enjoy a lot, as I believe that our learning and teacher training is deeper and more intense when we put into practice and experience that things that we are working about, and even more when the methods and materials are motivating and interesting for both teachers and students.

    Furthermore, I think that another aspect that makes this project interesting for the majority of us is that we are the ones who think, plan, design and develop the activities on our own, without following specific instructions from tutors or schools (like it occurs during the practicums or when we plan microteaching lessons based on a specific script); just taking into account our teacher and classmates’ advice.

    Last but not least, this project is demonstrating us the powerful and multiple uses of children films in education. Every film, even those that we think are simple and with a basic plot, can be used in many different ways to present the contents to kids through a motivating, enjoyable and cross-curricular methodology, and interesting and close materials and resources. The only thing we need is to know how to use them.

    Thank you for your interesting post! :)

  2. Hi Yolanda! I saw the word ‘film’ in the title of your post and I said to myself: ‘I have to read it and comment on it.’ :)
    I completely agree with you, these kinds of projects are prepared with much more motivation and enthusiasm because are directly addressed to children, and they are going to prepare us for our teaching future.
    Specifically I am interested in when you talk about that we have to go deeper and to see beyond in a film. As we all know, films are inspirational resources to use in a classroom and brings many advantages. Films in education are not just a plot and actions as many teachers do with just playing a film because like this is a waste of time. We can use films with students so that they can express linguistically by telling the plot, the clothes, characteristics, feelings of the characters (obviously using scaffolding). With this, we are helping the student to express itself, not just learning contents but mainly learning new vocabulary, expressions… For example, we can use here subtitles which are a good scaffolding technique that helps the student to acquire the language written and pronunciation at the same time he/she has a visual support reference which are the images. With that, student can tell the story helped with the film’s images.

    Thanks for sharing, see you!

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