Movie Reviews

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Educating with Movie Reviews. You can learn a lot from a movie. Every week we review a new movie. The Climb Housekids select the movie, and assign the roles. We work with them to help develop critical thinking and presentation skills.

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Goals of the Movie Reviews

There is never any right or wrong. We allow the kids to explore their own opinions and develop the ability to respond. What we were most interested in is the kids ability to think critically and to respond and present their ideas, defending their positions.

When we first started we had to give the kids a list of movies from which to choose. Now they pick their own movies and have branched out into different genres. For all of the movies the kids have individual roles. Which they assign and perform themselves. We then critique and discuss their presentation and ask questions about what they have learned and seen.

We started our movie reviews using high-quality documentaries. We wanted to give the kids something to discuss and examine that they would not normally see in school. Some of these movies included Gandhi, Nelson Mandela A Long Walk to Freedom and other relevant topics to African kids.

After exploring many different movies, mainly documentaries affecting African life, we then branched out into grate fictional stories that were close to or based upon reality.

Role: Director

The Director is responsible for organizing and presenting the kids review. This is an opportunity for each of the kids to work on and make a practical application of running a meeting. In this case, an online video conference over zoom.

The Director is also responsible for creating the movie review page on the website.

The current movie reviews are also being done with a PowerPoint presentation.

Role: Researcher

The Researcher is responsible for looking up and expanding upon an idea presented in the movie. The Researcher is probably the most challenged role. Based upon the research topic they select, we enter into a question and answer period. We typically employ a Socratic method to challenge their position.

Role: Questionnaire

The questionnaire is responsible for generating questions about the movie. In the beginning these questions typically dealt with factual information about the movie such as when it was created or the name of the Director. As time has gone on we have been able to move the kids into the direction of asking meaningful questions about the content or the way in which things were presented.

In the “Queen of Katwae“, we got into a very interesting discussion about how people in the impoverished community actively seek to keep people from excelling or becoming successful.

Role: Lessons Learned

No critical review of a movie would be complete without a lesson learned. The kids must not only present some thing that they feel they have learned from the movie but they must justify how they learned it and why they took that particular lesson out of the movie.

Role: Creator

The role of the creator is to take some thing from the movie and create something new. Typically the kids create an artwork depicting a particular scene of the movie. They were always asked why they picked that particular scene. Careen in particular I love this role because she is a budding artist.

Everyone: Reviews

Reviews is one of the more interesting sections. You can definitely see the kids personalities with their reviews and their reasons. No review is complete without a reason. In the beginning the reasons were, “because it was a good movie”. Slowly we were able to get them to expand upon their reasoning and express their viewpoints.