Using Movies for teachable moments (or teachable hours !)

(As written by DM
From an email she wrote to another mother on how she uses movies to help DS).

DS too was and is interested in Tamil movies.

In 2008 DS was hardly interested in anything only movies and cars (Indian). So I decided to use movies as a medium for learning. He would not understand anything. I tell him the story before hand, give the central story. I was not sure how much he understood. He used to dream while watching, only enjoy the stunts and car crashes. Two years back we have watched a movie everyday during summer holidays, some movies again and for him to comprehend better, which will be at the end of the day after he finishes his daily plan.

These are other things I worked on
1. Feelings
2 .Predicting what will happen
3. Teach  new terms as we encounter
4. Read the review of the movie before watching
5. Ask him the central story
6. Tell which parts he liked and did not like and why
7. Connect some incidents to our life as well while reading. Highlight how son shares things to his parents, I choose the movie I want to talk something about.
8. Now we watch movies, I ask him to choose by reading reviews and check with me. Which he does. He doesn't understand the review but he look at the picture or some words and learning to figure out if it is a good movie or if he will enjoy.

After five years I would say he comprehends the movie better.  I consider the following incidents to be highlights which happened recently.
1. He watched the Hindi movie "Black". He told it is similar to his life - the girl has challenges but tries hard to overcome those.
2. Watched a song video where a boy fights for his girl friend, pictured as a battle. DS told the boy is fighting all the obstacles that comes in the way of his goal. I too wanted to fight my obstacles. This is only realization right now, which I hope we will find ways to put it to practice.


Small Mercies - Photospos Free !

DS had a dream, not like Martin Luther King's but nevertheless something that made him extremely happy and excited. When he shared that with us, he was so delighted that we could see his eyes sparkling and twinkling !

The dream was this: He had dreamt that when he was an adult, he was doing the job of technology repairman - where he is fixing computers, printers, TVs etc. And he was driving his favourite Maruti Esteem car to the houses where he goes for his repair-calls. He added, that he will be first ever repairman who will be driving a car to his work !!

In any case, of late, he has also been saying he wants to do GED... we subtly motivate him that GED kind of education will be helpful for him to achieve his dreams, and it isn't going to be easy to do GED... In any case, as another motivation took, I downloaded a picture of Esteem from the net and super imposed his picture, with a sign of his future company in the car ! We hope this would continue to motivate him; we printed a wallet size photo of this, laminated it for him to keep in his wallet !

Thanks to Photopos application - http://www.photopos.com ; its a free app that helps us to play around with the photos; and in this case, extremely helpful !! The app itself is comparable to Photoshop that we pay big bucks for !

Above is (identity blurred :-)) picture that the app helped me create after merging two separate photos !