A Book and a Movie, Interview with Ticia Messing

This week on Homeschool Highschool Podcast: A Book and a Movie, Interview with Ticia Messing.

A Book and a Movie, Interview with Ticia Messing

One of our favorite things is learning with movies, so we are so excited to talk to Ticia Messing about learning with books and movies!

Ticia is an old friend of ours (we talked in an earlier episode about teens and volunteering). She shares about homeschooling her three teenaged sons and one teenaged daughter at Adventures in Mommydom. Her sons are all in high school and driving now, so her world is quickly changing.

Her sons have enjoyed homeschooling for their entire educational lives. Now they have extended their experiences by starting dual enrollment at the local community college. They are each taking one course to help them get a taste for college.

One of Ticia’s emphases in her homeschool is helping her teens explore, define and build career interests. Her teens’ current interests vary from firefighting to game design to restaurant ownership. (One of the ways she helps her teens explore career interests is through field trips. For instance, her firefighting-interested son has had field trips to the local firehall.)

Another of Ticia’s emphases is sparkling up the homeschool year with movies about the books that they read.

She has been using books and matching movies since her kids were in third grade.

For instance, when her kids were young, they read the story of Cinderella. Then they watched the movie: Ella Enchanted. On top of their reading and movie they made snacks to go along with the movie’s theme, such as pumpkin-carriage cupcakes! They followed up by comparing the book and the movie with a discussion.

Recently they read Alice through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, then watched the Disney movie and the movie Wonderland. They had a great family discussion on the similarities and differences between the movie and book. (Her teens have strong opinions about what they like and do not like about the changes the movies make in the story and/or characters.)

Some of the discussions they have about the movie include:

Why did the director make certain casting choices?
How can they make sense of plot changes that were made in the movie?
Are there absolute travesties in the movie’s version?
What did the movie get right?
Are there some things that were not in the book but worked well in the movie

How can parents get the most out of a book and a movie?

If you would like to work together as a family or have your teens work independently with a book and a movie, here are some suggestions.

Define your purpose for doing a book and a movie
- Just for fun
- Developing a topic they are studying (for instance, when they were studying Sci-fi, they read and watched lots of books and movies)
- Building thinking and conversation skills
Choose how many books and movies you want to cover?
- For instance, Ticia’s family reads one book and watches the accompanying movie each month.
Decide if you want to watch the movie first or or read the book first.
- Ticia’s family tends to watch Disney movies first, then reads the book.
- They read the book first on most other kinds of films.
Check out Ticia’s list of one hundred movies based on books for tons of ideas.

One way to make the most of books and movies is to use 7SistersHomeschool’s Cinema Studies for Literature Learning Study Guides.

These popular guides help students learn while enjoying classic movies!

The guides take classic movies and use them to teach literature analysis skills. Some of the movies in this series that are based on books include:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Apollo 13 based on the book: Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by astronaut Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger
Casablanca. There is a companion book written after the movie: We’ll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg
Charade based on the book by Peter Stone
Field of Dreams inspired by the book: Shoeless Joe by Ray Kinsella
Hook which is a riff from the story Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
Life of Pi based on the book by Yann Martel
Lilies of the Field based on the book by William Barrett
Moby Dick based on the book by Herman Melville
Remember the Titans based on the true story written by William Yoast
Rudy. Daniel Ruetigger’s autobiography was written afterwards
The Fellowship of the Ring based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic
The Thirty-nine Steps based on the novel by John Buchan
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe based C.S. Lewis’ classic
The Miracle Worker based on the biography by William Gibson
The Three Musketeers based on the classic by Alexandre Dumas
The Wizard of Oz based on the story by l. Frank Baum
Twelve Angry Men (a play by Reginald Rose)

Other guides in the series are just the literature-analysis guides for movies. There is no accompanying book.

We allow our teens to actually count these as books for their book lists IF they have completed the guide. The movies that do not have a book to go with them include:

Visit Ticia at AdventuresInMommydom.com for lots of enrichment for your homeschool. She specializes in literature and movies and LOTS of hands-on history ideas. Also, join us for today’s episode about a book and a movie!

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