I’m excited to introduce this week’s guest blogger: Fiona from Sped Adulting aka Adulting Made Easy. She is here to talk all about watching movies with special education classroom!
Teacher truth: Sometimes we watch movies on Fun Fridays! I know most people think the teacher is lazy and it’s not educational. I beg to differ though. There are some important skills that can be taught when you show a movie in class (or if you go on a CBI to the movie theater). Here are a few things I do to make it functional & educational.
I allow students to give me a movie of their choice that the class can vote on as a reward. Now if you have students that were able to choose a movie to vote on and their choice doesn’t get picked, it’s also another skill to work on accepting loss. If that doesn’t like it would work for your class, you can always do a point system where the student with the highest points get to choose the movie to watch.
As I just mentioned, students express their opinions and vote for a movie they’d like to watch. This is a great way to work on expressing preferences, advocating for your opinion, or giving an opinion. I usually use the Kami extension app to draw tallies on the movie choice board digitally, but this can easily be done on the whiteboard if you aren’t tech fancy. We count the tallies, then determine which movie had the most votes.
The slide you see above – I created in a few minutes but quickly Google Image searching the students’ movie choices and pasting them onto a Google Slide.
To attend the movie, students practice purchasing the correct ticket, counting money, next dollar up strategy, and waiting for change. This is a great opportunity to have students split up in groups where one group can practice vocational skills by being ticket booth employees, and the other group can purchase tickets. Once again, I use a Google Slide to quickly create a ticket with the movie that was chosen (and I can change the price so that students practice different amounts each time we watch a movie).
If we are in class, students can practice microwave skills to make popcorn and work on their social skills to request different toppings. In the past, we have also had a popcorn machine students could practice filling and making popcorn with. Add in more fun and serve diffrent drinks with the popcorn!
Before the movie/trip, we will review a social story on what to expect at the movie theather and what not to do while in the theater (putting feet up on the seat, talking loudly, texting on your phone…etc). During the movie, students practice sitting quietly and not disturbing others around them.
Check out this Movie Theater Virtual Field Trip Social Narrative that comes with comprehension questions.
After the movie is finished, we review and reflect on the movie. The worksheet pictured has students answer the genre, setting/location, setting/time period, main characters, what they thought of the movie, what their rating was (out of 5 stars) and if they would recommend the movie to a friend.
For more functional instruction ideas, click here!
Looking for some fun and functional math instruction, look here!
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