Teaching History through movies.

That’s right, this is us getting reading for a history lesson.  We are learning about the Boston Tea Party.  We watched the movie Johnny Tremain. 
 
Now we didn’t just watch the movie and leave it at that.  We had a Zeezok guide to the movies.  The Johnny Tremain z-guide has activities that go along with the movie.  Majority of them were questionnaires, which sometimes required us to re-watch parts of the movie.  We weren’t able to memorize everything.  Some of the activities are, a crossword puzzle, coloring pages, a Declaration of Independence memorization activity, activities about silver-smithing and apprenticeship.  There is even a section labeled for family discussion, and additional resources for further study section.

We loved the movie, the history lesson, and the time together as a family.  I think we all learned more about the Boston Tea Party, and the Sons of Liberty from watching this movie.  It is geared toward older students.  The Johnny Tremain guide is geared toward middle school students.  Tommy and Emily did great with it, and Katey stayed for a while, but ended up going and playing with Tyler. Paul and I really enjoyed it as well, we even printed out the questionnaire for us to do along with the kids.   While I think we all enjoyed the challenge of having to answer questions during the movie, there were times when the kids did get a little frustrated with how fast the answers to the questions came.  We solved that by pausing the movie, at times, and I also told them it wasn’t essential to answer all of them, they just needed to do their best, and that we would discuss the answers after the movie.  The only thing I wish there would have been more of, is the additional resources section. 

This did make for a fun history lesson.  We turned it into a movie night, with snacks, blankets, pj’s, the whole deal. 

Zeezok Publishing offers many z-guides to the movies.   They are $12.99 each.  They also offer the movies to go along with them for reasonable prices which is nice, because Johnny Tremain was not available on Netflix and it had a short wait at my local library, which is where I ended up getting it from.

To see what other crew members said about Zeezok’s guide to the movies, check out our post here.  There was a big variety  reviewed.

{I received this for free in order to write this honest review.  No other compensation was received.  All opinions expressed are my own and this was my experience.  Yours may be different.}