The Truman Show - Character Analysis

I can't believe it is the end of a term already - this one flew by! I am disappointed in myself for neglecting my blog so much over the past term but am chalking it up to being in a new school and spending more time getting adjusted and finding my feet. So to end the term, I would love to share some of our character analysis posters with you. 

I was pretty proud of how lovely and colourful our display turned out. Students worked in a cooperative group structure to complete this task in which they needed to identify the personality, appearance, feelings/emotions, actions and famous last words of one of the characters from the film. They then took turns in presenting their posters to the class for the students to complete their character analysis chart learning about all characters in the film.

The Truman Show - Film Analysis

Our Year 8 English classes are studying "The Truman Show" for their film analysis unit. I actually love this movie which makes it even more exciting to teach. I think that film analysis units are great as students are exposed to a different form of expression. Students are often more engaged with films as it appeals to different types of learners also. 

Now, to "The Truman Show". Since this is a short unit, I am only spending one session on themes and one session on characters. This will hopefully lead into our assessment task quite well, as I am hoping to really scaffold that so the students can achieve success with it. Our unit starts with students viewing the film and then completing a series of comprehension questions while viewing to deepen their understanding. Although a lot of the themes and concepts in the film are quite easy for me to grasp as an adult, I feel that some of them need to be explained for the students to actually understand what is happening. Sometimes the little gestures or comments have deep meaning and thus need to be discussed. 

For our character session, we are going to do a character analysis in a jigsaw activity and then students will use that information to create a Facebook profile for one of the main characters of the film (this will be in another post once we complete this task). Students will work in groups to complete a character analysis for one character and then we will present and share to complete our character analysis chart. I hope this activity runs well and will post about it afterwards too.