Monday, October 15, 2018

New Topic: Movies



On Wednesday morning, we brainstormed and selected a new topic - movies. Unlike our normal process, we made this selection without any discussion about an end product or goal. As such, I was unable to work us through our traditional KWL* chart.

The topic movies seemed way too broad to fill in a KWL chart. Instead, for our first day of this topic, I taped a blank conceptual map to the middle of the board. In the center of the map was the word "movies." In each quadrant of the paper, I wrote a single word: history, genres, jobs, or production (these four words came from our original brainstorming before we voted on the topics). At the center bottom of the may, I wrote "outcome." (See map above.)

My hope was that this map would help us focus or narrow the topic and identify an end result. Our initial discussion about the four categories indeed had an immediate impact. We quickly narrowed the topic to the production of movies.

As you can see above, our map quickly became a list of what we all know about the elements of producing a movie. A quick examination, however, illustrates how much we really don't know about movies, even though most of us have been watching movies all of our lives - via television, internet, or theaters.

We went on to decide that to learn more about movie-making we should study one movie. We also decided that we wanted to use our new-found knowledge to create a documentary about our center or adult literacy. Therefore, we are choosing to examine a documentary.

These goals are bodacious, but we agreed upon them. Our next step is to choose a documentary.

We brainstormed a list of 10 documentaries. On 10/17, we make our decision. We'll start with the content of the movie, and then we'll move on to the elements that created the content of the movie.


The final board describing what we know and want to do with this topic.

Our list includes:

  • Chasing Ice
  • Blackfish
  • Won't You be my Neighbor?
  • The Cove
  • The Falling Man
  • This Divided State
  • Supersize Me
  • March of the Penguins
  • Meru
  • Nikola Tesla's Biography

If you were us, which movie would you choose to study?

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*KWL chart =
K: What do I know?
W: What do I want to know?
L: What have I learned? (This part is filled in as we learn.)

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