The Lazy Way to Planning Lessons with Films

I’m sure that you are always trying to include in your classes material which is real, up-to-date and that your students find great fun. Of course, it is a very difficult combination to achieve, but it’s worth taking the trouble, because the results are optimum: your students get really engaged with the class and they learn up-to-date English.

One of the most useful resources that we can bring into the class are  films. However, we sometimes avoid working with films as it is extremely time-consuming to prepare a lesson based on them. Of course, we can resort to the old way: bring a film, give the students a few questions to answer after watching the whole of it, press play and forget about them for at least one hour and a half. We all perfectly know that that this is useless. They don’t learn a thing and most probably they answer the questions because they have already seen the film in their mother tongue.

If you want to work deeply with films in your classes and don’t want to spend too much time planning, I have found some solutions surfing the net. First of all, there is a page called Challenge-Education , in which you will find lots of lesson plans based on scenes from different films for all levels. There are some sample lessons you can download for trying purposes. I have used them and they are very effective and engaging.

If you would like to use a whole movie rather than just scenes, you should have a look at English Behind the Scenes . Here, apart from finding lesson plans for the entire movie, you will find tips on how to create activities to use with movies yourself. There are also some sample lesson plans you can download.

And now, what do you do with films in your classes? Share with us any other idea, resource or just your opinion on the topic. Looking forward to reading you.