Inside BlueSky’s Intro to Film Course
Recently, BlueSky expanded its middle school course offerings in order to give students a mix of electives that they could get excited about! We conducted a survey that was sent out to 7th and 8th grade BlueSky students, encouraging them to select from a few different potential electives. This survey resulted in our new Intro To Film course! We were especially excited to offer this course because the students had shown such a high interest in the subject.
7th-grade teacher, Amee Wittbrodt is currently teaching the first semester of this new class. She takes us through the structure, weekly curriculum, and student work below!
Weekly Curriculum
Every week in our new Intro to Film course, the students are given 3-5 movie titles to choose from, all of which fall under a selected weekly theme. Some previous themes that we’ve covered are; sports movies, true stories, and special effects movies. The week starts with a live lecture where we go through some background information around the theme and the kids are able to learn about the history of each of the themes and movies.
The students then select the movie they’d like to watch, after we watch the trailers together, and have an online group discussion around the film. Then the last assignment gives the students a chance to act as a movie critique on a public forum! They will write their review and post to commonsensemedia.com for others to read.
See some great reviews from our BlueSky students for the movie, 42 here!
Takeaways and Benefits of this Class
This class is an elective, so it is meant to be fun and interesting for students. And we’ve found that kids really enjoy the course, but it’s also benefiting them in academics. The course is serving as a sort of prep course for more advanced language arts classes that they may take in the future. By writing reviews of each of the films, they are practicing creative writing and opinion writing skills.
It creates a sense of community as well by giving them a chance to have a group discussion on each film. They are able to have a structured conversation about their own opinions on the movies and have a productive discussion about how they reacted to the film and around the themes as well.
Here at BlueSky, we value the opinions and experiences of our students. The electives we offer our students are meant to inspire, educate, and inform our students. To learn more about our course offerings, check us out here!
