Sunday, November 08, 2015

Peter Pan (1953) Movie Worksheets (Designed for Young Learner Low-Level Students)--Just the Links Version

[This post is an exact duplicate of the previous post.   The only difference is that the previous post contained all the worksheets and PowerPoints embedded, which sometimes made it difficult to load.  This post has nothing embedded, only the links to the Google drive version of the various worksheets and PowerPoints.]

(Movie Worksheets)

Below are all my worksheets and PowerPoint for Peter Pan (1953--a.k.a. the Disney version).

Google drive folder HERE

PowerPoint Presentations: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22,

Google Slides versions: Part 1--Published HerePart 2--Pub, Part 3--Pub, Part 4--Pub, Part 5--Pub, Part 6--Pub, Part 7--Pub, Part 8--Pub, Part 9--Pub, Part 10--Pub, Part 11--Pub, Part 12--Pub, Part 13--Pub, Part 14--Pub, Part 15--Pub, Part 16--Pub, Part 17--Pub, Part 18--Pub, Part 19--Pub, Part 20--Pub, Part 21--Pub, Part 22--Pub

Worksheets: Part 1: drive, docs, pub  Part 2: drive, docs, pub,  Part 3: drive, docs, pub, Part 4: drive, docs, pub, Part 5: drive, docs, pub, Part 6: drive, docs, pub, Part 7: drive, docs, pub, Part 8: drive, docs, pub, Part 9: drive, docs, pub, Part 10: drive, docs, pub, Part 11: drive, docs, pub, Part 12: drive, docs, pub, Part 13: drive, docs, pub, Part 14: drive, docs, pub, Part 15: drive, docs, pub, Part 16: drive, docs, pub, Part 17: drive, docs, pub, Part 18: drive, docs, pub, Part 19: drive, docs, pub, Part 20: drive, docs, pub, Part 21: drive, docs, pub, Part 22: drive, docs, pub,

Long Version: drive, docs, pub

These worksheets represent a change in thinking from when I first  - started designing movie worksheets.  Instead of just recycling a few sentences back to the students, I've decided that the students will get maximum benefit of the input if they are provided with the complete transcript of the movie.  The complete transcript of Disney's 1953 Peter Pan movie is thus spread out over these 22 worksheets.  (I used THIS WEBSITE HERE as my base for creating the transcript, but I also edited it heavily wherever I thought it was in error or incomplete).
These worksheets are designed for low level young children, and thus the task for each section is deliberately designed to be as easy as possible.   However, it can easily be adapted for high levels by simply increasing the difficulty of the task.

 I've got a fair amount I want to say about why I used these worksheets, how they are designed, and how they work.  I'll get into all that below.  If you want to skip all my ramblings, just click on the link above for the Google Documents.

Theoretical Justifications
Any use of authentic, ungraded material in the ESL classroom is controversial in and of itself.  But in my case, I'm feeling triply guilty.  Not only am I using authentic, ungraded material, I'm using it with very low level students, and I'm using it with young children (6-9 year olds) who have very short attention spans and limited ability to focus.

So, here is my justification.

I already laid out in a previous post why I think Young Learners benefit more from Comprehensible Input than from grammar exercises, and why I think Young Learner classes should spend 80% of the time giving students input.  (I'm not opposed to grammar exercises, but I think grammar lessons should be a clarification of what the students have already been noticing in the input, rather than introducing new forms that the students have never seen before.)

Of course the key word in comprehensible input is comprehensible.  The material should be highly graded for the level of the learners.
Authentic material doesn't qualify for this, but I think authentic material has its place.  Even if most of the language input in authentic material is incomprehensible to the students, they can still pick out and understand at least some words and phrases.  Authentic material probably shouldn't be the majority of the input for low-level students, but, assuming it's supplemented with a steady diet of heavily graded comprehensible input, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

In my particular case, however, one of the main reasons I resorted to this was because I felt like I didn't have a lot of other options.  I was frustrated that the assigned textbook for my Young Learner classes was based heavily on grammar exercises and very restricted language input (as, unfortunately, many young learner textbooks seem to be.)  I wasn't sure where I could get a lot of material for input for my students.
For this same class, I had previously used the Youtube Video series English Short Stories For Kids - English Cartoon With English Subtitle .  This was good for what it was, but I felt that the language input here was too restricted.  I wanted my students to be exposed to a wide variety of grammatical forms in the input, so that they weren't encountering these forms for the first time in the textbook grammar lessons.
I was also frustrated with the way English Short Stories For Kids - English Cartoon With English Subtitle kept disappearing and then re-appearing on the web.  If I spend a lot of time designing worksheets around a movie, I want to be able to re-use them for other classes.  No more designing materials just based off of random Youtube sites I had no control over, I decided.  (Although I did end up using Youtube for Peter Pan, I was relatively confident that this was a classic movie I could easily track down in a million and one other places if one source happened to go off line).

So, I made the decision to try to break my low-level 6-9 year olds into watching authentic movies.

My philosophy in making these worksheets was to try to make the opportunity for input as great as possible, but to make the actual task as easy as possible.  So, for example, I gave my students the complete transcript for the movie in order that they would have the opportunity to absorb as much as it as possible, but at the same time, the task that they had to complete was very easy.

How These Worksheets are Designed to Work

Every class, before the movie, I give the students 5 words to listen for on the PowerPoint.  Because these are low level students, I use pictures to explain the vocabulary (and consequently can only use vocabulary words that lend themselves to visual representation).

Then, several lines of dialogue from the previous movie segment are reviewed in "The Story Last Time" section.

For "The Story Last Time" sections, I combined the words from the transcript with the relevant pictures from the movie.  (All of the pictures from the movie were taken from THIS VERY USEFUL WEBSITE HERE.  If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see a comment I left by myself  on September 25th, 2015, thanking these people for hosting the pictures, and kindly letting them know their server was down (comment #25).  They fixed the problem immediately.)
The first time I did this section (Part 2) I viewed its purpose as simply to remind the students where they were in the movie, and thus kept it short (only a couple of lines of dialogue).  However, I rapidly began seeing this section as a very useful way to force students' attention on the language, and also to allow the students time to absorb some of the language that they might have trouble catching in real time listening.  So for all subsequent PowerPoints, this section was greatly expanded.

Initially I thought I would read out the dialogue, and my students would follow along and listen.  But one of the benefits of teaching young students is that they're always very eager to participate, and without my even prompting them, the students began to read the words out-loud chorally.  So I just got out of the way, and let them read it.  If mispronunciations occurred, I would correct them, but otherwise I just let the students read everything.

Despite the high level of vocabulary, mispronunciations in my class were surprisingly few.  My students had absorbed most of the basic rules of phonics in English, and the only problems were words that did not conform to expected sound/spelling correlations or had silent letters (e.g. island).

However pronouncing the words is one thing, actually understanding them is completely different.  I doubt my students comprehended much more than 50% of the words they were reading, but I think having them read off these lines of dialogue was still a good noticing technique for any new words or grammatical structures that might have been at their level of acquisition.  If the majority of the input went completely over their head, I was willing to live with that on the off-chance that they might notice one or two things.

Then, I played the movie.

I used a version of this movie on Youtube, simply because I did not have access to an alternative at the time.  (I'm still new in this country, and don't know how to track down DVDs yet.)  There are several copies of this movie on Youtube (at the moment), but I used THIS COPY HERE.  All of the links on the PowerPoint presentations will go to that version of the movie.
Although I don't claim to have done an exhaustive search of every copy of Peter Pan on the Internet, of the half dozen or so videos I listened to, this one had the best sound quality.  It also had the worst visual quality (it looks grainy and pixelly).  But I decided to sacrifice visual quality for sound quality.
(If anyone else out there is considering using these worksheets, I recommend just getting a copy of the authentic DVD if at all possible).

Because Youtube offers the feature of being able to link to an exact time in the video, all of the hyperlinks from the PowerPoint will take you right to an exact time in the movie.  (At the time of this writing, the links are all still valid.  But obviously I can't make any promises about the future.  Since this movie is still under copyright, the Youtube version could get taken down at any time).
I set up the links so that the video always starts with the dialogue that the students have just got done reading on the PowerPoint.  (This allows the students to hear, at a natural speed, the exact same words that they have just been reading, and thus hopefully encourages Bottom-Up listening skills.)  The first few lines of dialogue in every section are thus review, but then once these lines finish, the new language will come in.

After the segment of the movie finishes, I hand out the worksheets with the transcript on it.  Because these worksheets were designed for young learners, I used big, easy- to-read 20 point font.  I allowed myself to spill over from one page onto two pages (thus every class the students get a 2 page handout.)  But I stopped myself at 2 pages.  If there was any more dialogue, then the scene would just have to get broken up into several parts and spread out over multiple classes.
Each transcript has 5 missing words.  These are the same 5 words that the students had learned on the PowerPoint.  (The missing words are also in a word bank at the top of the sheet).  The students must fill in the 5 missing words to the corresponding blanks.

Since my goal was always to keep the task as easy as possible, I tried to make all of these words something the students could hear and see at the same time.  The gold standard was if I could find words that the character was saying while doing the action or making a gesture--like if a character says "ears" while pointing to his ears, or something like that.  I couldn't always find 5 words that matched this criteria for every section, but that was my goal.  (Although undoubtedly I probably let a few good ones slip under my nose.)

I didn't attempt to distinguish between useful vocabulary and genre specific vocabulary.  Fantasy words and pirate words were all fair game if I could find any instances where a character was gesturing to the word as they said it.  (My theory is all vocabulary is good vocabulary.  Plus, over the years I've noticed that Young Learners are always very interested in vocabulary for fantasy and adventure stories).

Also, in the goal of keeping the task as easy as possible, I also didn't have any qualms about repeating the vocabulary from lesson to lesson.  If the same word popped up in two different scenes, I used it on two different days.  Some of the words got used several times over.
For the same reason, I also tried to make the deleted word obvious from context.  Particularly I would try to make the gap somewhere where the word was getting repeated several times.  For example: "Following the leader, following the leader, __________ the leader".

After the movie segment finished, I gave the students a couple minutes to try to read the transcript by themselves, and fill in any of the words from memory or guessing from context.
Because my students were all low-level, this stage was more aspirational than functional.  But I wanted them to get into the habit of trying to read the transcript for themselves, so that when they do reach a level where this task is realistic, they'll already be in the habit.
And I'm happy to report that many of the students actually did start to have some success with this.  It took them a while to get used to this, but by the 15th worksheet or so, the higher level students were actually starting to write in the answers by themselves.

However, to avoid student frustration, I was also careful not to let this stage go on for more than a few minutes before I broke in again with the movie.

I played the movie again and, in theory, the students followed along with the transcript this time.  Again, this was also more aspirational than functional.  The lower students got lost easily.  But several of the high level students actually tried to follow along with the movie.  And by the 15th worksheet, they were starting to get very good at it.

To make sure everyone stayed with the task, I keep my finger by the pause button.  After the missing word had been uttered, I paused the video, and made sure everyone got the answer.   (Because it can be quite laborious for young learners to spell out words, I also give them a minute to all write the word down.)  Then we continued the video.
At the end, we do class feed back, and review the sentences and vocabulary as a class with the PowerPoint.

I also made several quizlet quizzes so that the students could review the vocabulary at home.   (I've been going a bit quizlet crazy after a colleague introduced me to it.)   I doubt many of my students actually did these quizzes, but at least the option was there.  The website address for each quiz is at the bottom of each worksheet, but I'll also post it here.  Quizlet Folder HERE,  Peter Pan 1 , Peter Pan 2 , Peter Pan 3Peter Pan 4 , Peter Pan 5 , Peter Pan 6Peter Pan 7 , Peter Pan 8,  Peter Pan 9 , Peter Pan 10Peter Pan 11 , Peter Pan 12 , Peter Pan 13 , Peter Pan 14 , Peter Pan 15 , Peter Pan 16 , Peter Pan 17 , Peter Pan 18 , Peter Pan 19 , Peter Pan 20 , Peter Pan 21 , Peter Pan 22

Evaluation
So, I'm very happy with the way this little project turned out.

That's not to say everything went perfectly.  When you do anything with young kids, however, you have to accept that it's not going to go exactly how you planned it.

One of the things I had to accept early on was that my students were not going to watch the movie in perfect silence.  I tried to get them to be quiet by reviewing the rules for movie watching every class, but perfect silence was never going to happen.

I realized that children at this age view movie watching as a participatory experience.  They like to keep up a running commentary on what they're watching.  And paradoxically, the more they enjoy a movie, the more they feel the need to talk through it.  The parts of this movie my students enjoyed the most were also the parts they felt the most need to talk through.   For example they would yell  out "Teacher!  Teacher!  It's funny!  It's so funny!"  Or "Tinkerbell is very beautiful"  Or "I don't like Captain Hook."  Et cetera.

Because they were talking during the movie, they missed some of the input.  But I just had to accept that this was going to happen.  If they got some of the input, I considered that a victory.

Also, following along with the transcript was a mixed success.  The weaker students didn't even try.  But the stronger students tried to follow along with the transcript and, I'm happy to report, actually got better doing it as we went along.

On the whole, I'm very happy with the way things turned out.  The language level in this movie was probably too high for my students, but the level of enjoyment they got out of this movie was much higher than any of the readings or listening exercises from their textbooks.
(Sidenote: Those ESL textbooks are really terrible, aren't they!  It seems like the authors are going out of their way to bore students to death as much as possible.)
The students were very engaged with the material, in a way that they never were with the "Billy and Sally visit Grandma" stories in their textbook.  And that level of high engagement is worth a lot.

There was some hints from the students themselves that I may have made the vocabulary a little bit too easy.  "Teacher, it's not new vocabulary" they would say when I would introduce the new words at the top of the lesson.  "It's easy.  It's very easy."  But they still got practice noticing how this vocabulary is used in natural English, and got some practice writing it down.  And they did learn some new words as well (for example: pixie, shadow, splash, walk the plank, etc. were all new words for them.)  And at the very least, all the students got some vocabulary practice out of this exercise.

The Racism Question
Okay, so there's a long version of this discussion, and a short version of this discussion.
In the long version, I try to examine this question from several angles.  I admit that this movie is pretty racist, but justify why I think that in spite of every thing, it has a lot of good points that overall make it still worth watching.
I may do the long discussion on another day in a separate post, but for now I don't want to make this post too cluttered.

The short version of this discussion is where I just admit I have mixed feelings.  There were some days where I thought to myself, "What am I doing?  Of all the movies I could have shown to my class, why am I using one with racist stereotypes?  I'm not taking seriously my responsibility to positively influence young minds."  And I did feel pretty mixed about it some days.  But, once started, this project took on a momentum of it's own, and we just continued through the whole movie regardless.

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