A recent PLC conversation prompted me to create a ‘movietalk’ based on the Bluey episode “Grannies”. My young students absolutely adore this TV show (search ABC iView) and honestly, my Mum and I do too!! For background on this TV show, see here. There are many things I love about Bluey and without doubt, the top most reason is the assumptions we all make about gender; even for very young students. It certainly is an excellent show for discussing gender stereotyping.

My movietalk went incredibly smoothly! When I opened the powerpoint, my students actually cheered! The students recognised the episode and many agreed with me that it was one of their favourite episodes too. A colleague, shout out to Julie M, asks her young students to share their favourite episodes from the past week! Isn’t that a great idea as a starting point to determine which episodes will connect with your learners!!

This episode has as usual, stories within stories, and most of the plot is outside the vocabulary acquisition of my reception (preppy) students, so I just focused on the mini plot that Nanna’s can’t floss dance. Unlike my attempt at storytelling last week where students chatted constantly (mostly to comment on my hilarious lack of drawing skills), you could have heard a pin drop they were so engaged! I am still gobsmacked at how successful it was.

To create a movie talk, I watched the episode and took screenshots of the main action. I then went through them all and eliminated all that required vocabulary my students have not yet acquired. Being fourth term, it is guaranteed that this will be a messy term (swimming, bookweek, etc), so I usually plan around consolidating what students already know through unfamiliar texts. I tossed up whether to use ‘nenek’ (Grandmother) in my text and decided not to. Instead I stayed with Nanna. Next week I plan to use this to kick off a conversation about the different names we call our grandmother and link this to Indonesia where ‘grandmother/nenek’ is also not the same word grandchildren call their grandmothers and that the names Indonesian grandchildren use also varies greatly.

I identified 15 pictures that had the potential for a mini story. I worried during the planning that this would be too many and so added in a TPR break in the middle to give them wiggle time, but it was totally unnecessary!! OMG I could get used to this!! Here is a snap shot of the screenshots and text I used.

I added text to my images to help me to stay in bounds with the story telling. I also believe that including text for junior primary students adds a level of complexity for my more literate students who enjoy reading along with me. (As I have learners throughout the school with developing literacy skills, I firmly believe it is vital that we support our students through using easy to read fonts eg. century gothic.) I discovered just how many were reading the text whenever I had inadvertently included an error. In copying and pasting text from one page to another, I had forgotten to change character names!! Nothing like teacher errors to inspire more to read and check for further mistakes!! A sneaky way to increase input through reading for meaning!!

The icing on the cake for this mini story was finding colouring pictures on the Bluey website and other unofficial sites. I used several colouring pictures to create a listen and match worksheet. Students needed to listen to a sentence, colour the matching text box with a certain colour and then link it to the appropriate illustration. The lesson finished with students colouring in the illustrations which they absolutely loved doing. With my first class, the colouring in was done together to get reps on colour vocabulary, but I gave my last class time to choose their own colours. Not convinced yet of the value that a single lesson has for revising more than two colours is for young learners.

A final step I will be taking is creating a book from the powerpoint pages to add to my class library. As Amy Roe recommended, laminate all pages to make the books last longer!! It also makes them look fantastic . Make sure you use matte laminate though – glossy laminate needs to be banished from all schools and classrooms! Order through Officeworks. Orders over $55 are delivery free which is basically the cost of one packet!! Awesome for those of us in non-metro areas!! Matte laminate is more expensive but worth every cent because posters become accessible to all learners regardless of where they are in the classroom! No reflections!!