Videos to Use When Teaching Depth and Complexity

Let's face it-kids today are very much visual learners. They watch YouTube videos in their free time. I can read a story using voices and emphasis-it can be about dinosaurs or underwear and they still won't be as engaged in my story as they would be if I played a video of it.

Keeping that in mind, here are some videos I use to tie in the Depth and Complexity concepts. I play the video and then we discuss or the kids write about what they noticed. How is this told from another perspective? What is the big idea?

So here are some of my favorite ones to use:

Multiple Perspectives:

A Piece of Chalk-video about the life of boy who gets rid of stress by breakdancing:

A Piece of Chalk

How was the story told from his perspective?

Bumbleville

How is the perspective of living in a snowglobe different from your perspective?

Raccoon and the Light

How did the perspective of the raccoon differ from your perspective?

Videos for Big Idea

Kindness Boomerang

Rock, Paper, Scissors Commercial

Rock, Paper, Scissors

A Girl and Her Cloud

A Girl and Her Cloud

Fur-ever Friends

Fur-ever Friends

Changing the Details-Cinderella

We are in the midst of our fairy tale unit and we read several different versions of Cinderella including:

We made a chart comparing the trends in all these books. They all followed the basic Cinderella story, only the species of the protagonist changed. So then I asked the students to create a new version and make note of what details would change. Would it be a new setting? A new ending?

I wonder how Vin would feel about this one. :) 

Multiple Perspectives-If I Were a Principal

We read several stories about school the first few weeks. Authority figures is a social studies objective so it fits right in with books like:

We also invited our principal to read us a story and were lucky enough to have him come do that.

So I asked the students to imagine they were a principal and to write from that perspective. Here is what they came up with: