AdLit.org: Adolescent Literacy – Pairing Texts with Movies to Promote Comprehension and Discussion

I found this in my twitter feed under the hashtag #engchat, a place where great English/Language Arts and Reading teachers post ideas, questions, articles, etc. for the good of the group. Most of the time I can’t keep up, but when I’m not looking for anything in particular, I tend to find the most amazing things.

Before, when I’ve paired texts with movies, I’ve paired directly. Movie version to text version. When I taught 9th grade, which seems like forever ago, we watched different versions of the Romeo & Juliet story and critiqued stylistic and compositional choices, as well as the implications of the story itself. It was fun. It was a challenge for me as a first year teacher, and it was a challenge for my students because they had never been required to engage in that kind of analysis before.

But I like the idea of pairing a print text with a similarly themed movie text. The novel I’d like to teach this year is The Gardener by S. A. Bodeen. I have an entire project in mind that crosses my reading class with the science content area (unfortunately I teach 8th grade reading and earth science is 7th grade or I’d try to work it so that my unit falls when they’re doing photosynthesis and team teach). I’m not a huge movie buff, so does anyone have ideas about a movie to pair with a book about population control and turning humans into autotrophs?