Section 2: Television and films
On this website, you will find other pages that outline ways of working with moving image texts that focus on the texts themselves. In this section, we will consider how you might enable student teachers to draw on children’s interests in television and film in order to promote engagement in reading and writing print-based texts. This is not to suggest that this is the only way in which film and television should be used – these media should not simply be used to facilitate learning with print-based media, as that privileges the latter. However, given that there is a wealth of guidance on working with moving images in other sections on this website, the focus here will be on using them as a springboard for literacy.
Television
The majority of children in the UK watch television on a daily basis. It is therefore a valuable source of material for the literacy curriculum. These are a number of ways in which television programmes have been used in primary classrooms:
Children have been invited to:
- write about their favourite television programmes, justifying their choices to a Channel Controller who is about to cut the number of children’s programmes by a third;
- develop character descriptions of favourite characters;
- write a script for the ending of a favourite episode of a series.
Titles of programmes are also a useful focus of study. In groups, student teachers could be asked to look at a television schedule for a week across a number of television channels e.g. CBeebies; CBBC; Nickelodean Junior; Milkshake; Cartoon Network. Judging from the titles of the programmes, they could then allocate the programmes to a particular genre e.g. comedy; cartoons; documentary; soap opera. The groups could then compare their lists and justify why particular titles were placed in specific categories. This is a valuable activity in that it requires student teachers to reflect carefully on titles and think about how they signal (or not) particular themes/ genres.
Building on this, student teachers could then be given a list of horse races from a current daily newspaper. Randomly choosing the name of a horse in any race, the student teachers could then write a brief that would outline the plot of a television programme with that title. Here is an example:
Princess Jessie
This is a cartoon that is centred on a princess who lives in a castle on a hill. Jessie is rather fed up with being a princess as she is not allowed to do everyday things, such as play football with the local village girls. Each episode focuses on a different adventure in Jessie’s life when she manages to slip away from the castle and becomes involved in everyday life in the village. For example, in the first episode, she smuggles out of the castle in a baker’s cart and gets involved in rescuing a village family’s dog from the river. At the end of each episode, Jessie returns to the castle and greets her parents, who have been oblivious to Jessie’s adventures.
Student teachers could then consider how this activity might be adopted for the classroom.
Films
Popular films can be drawn upon in the classroom in a number of ways. The website ‘Pocket Movies’ contains a number of film trailers than can be downloaded for free. Student teachers could be asked to download a trailer for a popular children’s film from this site and to identify a range of writing activities that could be based on the trailer.
For example, a group of student teachers watched the trailer for the film ‘Ice Age 2’, which portrayed a squirrel chasing a nut across slippery ice in the Antarctic. They identified the following writing activities based on that trailer:
Children could be asked to write:
- a ‘voiceover’ for the clip;
- a script which details the next sequence;
- a flyer promoting the film;
- an entry for the film in a films-listing magazine.
For further ideas on working with film and television to promote literacy, see Marsh and Millard (2000).
 
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