Pairs of Shorts: A New Way to Do Movie Shorts

So I have been thinking for a while about how to make the time spent with movie shorts more meaningful without making it more repetitive. I am always all about repetition without being repetitive!

This idea came to me at the very end of last school year, and I couldn't wait to put it into action--which is why it is the first thing I did with my Latin II class this year. It's simple in premise, and only a little complicated in application, but I think the benefits are really outstanding.

The premise is: for two days in a row, do two movie talks, then on a third day, compare and contrast them in some way.

The application takes a little more finesse, I realized, as I looked at the vocabulary I needed to teach and reinforce, and realized I needed to do two things to make this work:

1. Find two movie shorts that complement the vocabulary enough that I could work it in without it being difficult
2. Find two movie shorts that complement each other enough that comparing and contrasting them makes sense

In addition, I decided to make things harder by adding this:

1. Find two movie talks that share a theme with the story we are going to be reading next week

That said, eventually I realized that I could think of two movie shorts that both shared the theme of the struggle of parent-child relationships and overprotective zeal. So I created movie talks for Bao and Far From the Tree and then a comparison activity for my students that was heavy on the input and low on the output since they are fresh from summer. The layout of my activities is below!

Day 1
Bao Movie Short 
If time permits, Vocabulary Match Cards

Day 2
Far From the Tree Movie Short
If time permits, Vocabulary Bricks

Day 3
Pairs of Shorts Activity* Please see explanation below!
Discussion in class about the characters and students' evaluations of them and their motivations.

Helpful Resources!

• My blog posts about games and activities I've created to go with Google Classroom. Specifically, this one includes Vocabulary Match Cards and this one includes Vocabulary Bricks.
• There are a lot of resources about how to do movie talks. I think this one by Keith Toda is probably the most succinct and offers two Latin demonstrations.
• The Pairs of Shorts Activity is new! The link is view-only, so to really understand how it works, you will need your own copy. I made an interactive Google slide and assigned a copy to each student in Google Classroom. There are three slides that ask questions about the three parents in the story: do they love their child, do they fear their child, does their child like them?

• Students are given the heads of the mother from Bao and the two fully grown raccoon parents from Far From the Tree to drag on a continuum of how much they agree or disagree with the question: very much, yes, no, not at all. Then, below those three slides are screen shots and statements from the movie talks that students use to choose from as "reasons" or "rationes" they answered the questions the way they did. I told them there's no right or wrong answer--as long as their reasons make sense. This compels them to read through the stories again, possibly up to three or more times, to find the right reasons to paste on each of the question slides.

Final Takeaways
I think this was a successful shakeup of the normal movie talk pattern. Students stayed engaged with the vocabulary because there was always something new to see and hear. I enjoyed the change in pattern myself and felt more excited to teach each day when there was new material, even though the words were the same. 

My eventual plan is to do something similar with less scaffolding for the discussion, but for right now, this is Latin II and we haven't even attended a full week of school, so I'll let them ease in a little!