This little video which I refer to as “Giving the Gift of Time” may be about saving time, but it certainly didn’t work out that way for me!

As some of you may recall, I was taking an in-service course at the end of the previous school year. For the course I prepared what I thought would be a pre-reading task for the story I am going to teach “Thank You Ma’m” by Langston Hughes. I used the tool we were learning about for adding questions to videos called Zaption, instead of my beloved Edpuzzle.

However, instead of enjoying having this particular task on my to-do list marked as done, I’ve sat and made a new version. For two reasons:

a – I wanted the task to lead to a discussion about uncovering motives and what that really means. That is the most important higher order thinking skill to teach in relation to this story. I didn’t think the previous exercise was what I wanted.

b – I was very unhappy with Zaption and the way it embedded online. Unless you viewed it in full screen you could miss the questions. When working in full screen it often exited that format on its own initiative.

In short, here’s the video. The worksheet is below. I learned about this video from the site Film English.

Dial Direct “The Notebook” directed by Greg Gray from Velocity on Vimeo.

Worksheet: Gift of time pre reading Mam