After four class periods of preparation and lots of background research, finally, today we began watching the film. After 15 minutes of Free Voluntary Reading, I began doing "Picture Talks" with students. These pictures are screenshots of the important scenes from the film. First, I pointed out the location, time and the setting. The infamous annual college entrance exam (gaokao) in China, which takes place on June 7th, June 8th and June 9th. Anyone dreams to go to a college will only have one opportunity each year to give it a shot. Typically, two kinds of students who take gaokao...
Better Days – A Film Journey4
In the previous three posts, I journaled the preparations for this film class. Yesterday, we had our fourth class. Students were asked to do background research on the film director, Zeng, Guoxiang, the male lead, Jackson Yee, and the female lead, Zhong, Dongyu. After the free voluntary reading, we dived into soliciting background information. Here are what students shared. The inquiry process took up the most part of the class. After that, we played a Blooket game which I designed ahead of time, based on the research I did on these three people. Blooket provides different game modes. We played...
In my previous posts, I shared that we were going to begin a film unit for my I3 and I4 combination class. Here is what happened in yesterday’s class.
We began our class with 15 minutes of Free Voluntary Reading.
Then we launched into a few rounds of Quizlet Live game. Here is a sample of the Quizlet list I generated for them.
Quizlet shuffles teams randomly. I encourage students to find their team quickly and work through the problems together. It is a fast-moving game, students don’t dwell on the loss or win as they are asked to dive into the next round immediately.
Then, I pulled a few videos from Youtube and asked students to apply the film terminologies to analyze the video with me. Li Ziqi is one of our favorite channels for movie talks, clip chats, and or cultural insights. Each film is so beautifully done. Sometimes, students are so engrossed in the film and they forget to shout out the film terminologies. I always prefer to create an opportunity for students to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of culture while they work on their linguistic features.
For homework, I asked students to do background research on Better Days’ film director, Zeng, Guoxiang, the male lead, Yiyang, Qianxi, and the female lead, Zhou, Dongyu.
I’ll let you know what they have found out.
By Haiyun
Better Days – A Film Class Journey 2
In the last post, I shared that we were beginning a film in class. I asked students to listen to the theme song to get a sense of what might be happening in the movie. Today I had my intermediate 3/4 class (I3/4). Here is what has been taken in place. First, I began the class with free voluntary reading (10 minutes). Students chose a reading of their own interests, read quietly and then keep a simple log of what they read. This record is for themselves to keep. I'll begin a check-in during the second week. Typically, I call...
Better Days – A Film Class Journey 1
Hi everyone, I sincerely hope you have had a wonderful and relaxing winter break to recuperate. My winter break was filled with painting walls, cleaning windows, and mopping floors as we were preparing to get our house on the market. Luckily, our hard work was paid off, we accepted an offer after two days. Before that, I have never touched a paintbrush. In order to get the job done, not only I dispensed the belief of not knowing how, I dived in from the head to the toes, but also turned it into a shared experience for the whole family. ...
Our Shining Days – Part 1: Movie Analysis
Alice Wang, a Chinese teacher from Indiana, shared a clip of Our Shining Days with me and asked me how I would use it in class. After watching it, I liked it. Unlike many other youth movies in China, which often takes on the lack of sex education in Chinese tradition. They often depict hormonal driven and horny teens to engage in experiential learning of sex. As a consequences, quite few female leads, in the film, always end up with an abortion and abandonment by her lover. Tragedy!!! Main Plot: Our Shining Days take on a relevant and pressing challenge:...