July 20, 2012
Each summer, my husband chooses a list of films for us to watch, once per week. We call this our “Summer of Funner Film Festival.” The last few years have featured classic Marx Brothers films, Fred and Ginger dance pics, Philo Vance flicks, and a bit of old fashioned Shakespeare. This year’s theme is “Colourful Films,” a broad title, but not without purpose. Last Sunday, instead of playing a classic film at home, we went downtown in the pouring rain to check out something new! Our first film for our Summer of Funner Film Festival 2012 was a new release, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.
Today, I had the kids write movie reviews of Moonrise Kingdom. We did this in two stages. First, they filled out a Movie Review Pre-writing Worksheet that I created for them to use all summer long. This worksheet provided them with the tools to write a formal review of the movie. I asked them to write a basic two-sentence summary of what the movie was about, to describe their favourite scenes and discuss why they liked them, to discuss something they might change about the movie, and to decide whether or not they would recommend it to others. Bea wrote passionately about a scene in which lightning strikes one of the movie’s heroes, while Tobes wrote about his favourite “tent lifting scene.” Interestingly **spoiler alert!**, both kids decided that they would “not have Snoopy the dog die” in the film. They also both came up with a “star system” of rating the film for the “would you recommend it” section of the worksheet.
For step two, instead of making the kids feel as if they were going to have to write an essay based on the worksheet (this is Summer, not the school year, after all!), I had them take what they would from their worksheets and enter it into their Yesterday Books. Tobes decided that he had enough of writing and chose to draw a fabulous illustration of a camp site. Bea decided that she liked both Tobes’ drawing and his “favourite scene from the movie” worksheet entry so much that she changed the description of her favourite scene from her worksheet and followed suit with Tobes in a one page essay and in an illustration. Apparently, the younger critic proved quite the inspiration today!
Here are the critics hard at work:
And, here’s a pdf copy of our Movie Review Worksheet.
You can also copy and paste the image below.
My kids used these forms yesterday after we saw the new Madagascar movie! They loved them! Thanks for the free printable! Love this site!!!!