Curated OER
Building a Documentary Library
Documentary films allow your class to visit new places and gain a deeper understanding of complex issues.
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Film Festival: Documentaries for Hispanic Heritage Month
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, the New York Times provides links to five short documentary films depicting Hispanic themes and culture. Learners can click on each embedded link to view the films, then answer each set of related...
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Watershed Documentary
High schoolers research and produce an iMovie documentary about the human and natural history of a stream basin (watershed).
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General Lesson Plan for Documentary Lens
Use this general lesson guide to inform your instruction surrounding a documentary. The lesson is made up of five activities. The activities are intentionally general because they are designed to adapted for specific films. While the...
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Descending to the Challenge: Developing Documentaries About the Deep Ocean
The video clip that comprises the warm up is not available, but the related article from The New York Times and the movie trailer for Aliens of the Deep are, leaving enough material to make this a fascinating instructional activity on...
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War Story Documentary
Students review research skills and determine an aspect of war to research. They research an aspect of a war experience and bring history to life through iMovie.
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War Story Documentary
Students research and create an aspect of a war. They practice on writing a bibliography and essays.
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Documentary-Style Research Projects
Show your pupils how to use guiding questions to help them focus their research into a topic. Using the framework provided by these questions, researchers explore a topic, collect interesting facts, and prepare a PowerPoint presentation...
Apple
A Curriculum for Digital Media Creation
Consumer technology has made it possible for filmmakers to create entire movies from the comfort of their home computer. Guide high school film buffs through the process of designing a documentary with an extensive unit published by...
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Movie Cloze
For this movie worksheet, students fill in the blanks to sentences with movie vocabulary. Students fill in the blanks for 24 sentences about movies.
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Making Movie Storyboards
Students explore the importance of images in telling a story in film, analyze movie clips and identify some visual cues that help them explain the story; students work collaboratively to storyboard a passage from a book and present them...
Film Foundation
To Kill a Mockingbird: What Is a Movie?
The challenge film makers face when creating a film based on a novel or nonfiction text is the focus of a interdisciplinary resource that uses To Kill a Mockingbird to teach viewers how to read the visual images of film. A must-have...
Channel Islands Film
First Contact: Lesson Plan 4 - Grades 5-6
After watching Treasure in the Sea, a documentary about Channel Islands National Park and the video First Contact, about the voyage of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo to the Channel islands, groups research and then compare the experiences of...
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Ballou High School Marching Band Documentary Lesson Plans
Students examine the journey of the Ballou Marching Band. In this America's Promise instructional activity, students read about Colin Powell and examine the history of America's Promise. Students explore the Five Points of the program...
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Dolphin Documentary
Students create a movie, out of paper, based on their knowledge of dolphin natural history. Students brainstorm what they know about dolphins and draw pictures of the dolphin facts. When the pictures are placed end to end they create a...
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Watershed Documentary
Students conduct research and collect data about a local watershed area. They create an iMovie showing the human and natural impacts on the creek and watershed areas.
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Fast Food and Daily Nutrition Choices
Students explore food. In this nutrition instructional activity, students investigate multiple facets of healthy eating and how the fast food industry impacts our society. They will participate in class discussions, read from their...
Teaching Tolerance
Film Festival
Everybody's a critic—even your pupils! Using the included resources as a guide, screen films related to social justice and ask film enthusiasts to critique them. Publish the reviews for your school community or develop a film festival...
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Rights and Responsibilities: Grass Born to Be Stepped On
Students research an event in history in which rights and responsibilities are involved. They create a movie of the information they find.
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Films About World War II
Ninth graders focus on how filmmakers have changed their view of the Second World War. They create portfolios or their own documentary to investigate the various screen interpretations of the wartime era and explain different points of...
MCHS Early US History
Ken Burn’s Civil War, Episode 1: The Cause
Ken Burn's epic documentary miniseries The Civil War, broadcast in 1990, was the most-watched PBS program ever. A question sheet helps viewers keep track of events in the first episode of the documentary.
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Las Vegas: We Are Just Like You
Students practice making multimedia documentary films by investigating cities of America. In this U.S. geography lesson, students examine Las Vegas and compare the state of Nevada to 15 other states and discuss their main differences....
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The Envelope Please
Students examine and research the importance and functions of the skeletal system in vertebrates. They construct a 10-foot geodesic dome to illustrate the importance of architectural frameworks and create a clay animation movie.
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Dolphin Documentary
Young scholars use their knowledge of dolphin natural history to create a "movie."