By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-page classroom-ready resource.
Three differentiated sets of questions in chronological order. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 40 full sentence question set.
- Shorter 30 question version.
- 30 question multiple choice set well suited to ESL and ELL students.
- A 9-scene storyboard of what they consider the movie's most important moments, with a brief description for each scene.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using that storyboard.
This part covers two activities.
- Choosing an Addams Family character and writing about them following guided prompts, including a drawing of the character.
- Three short diary entries from the perspective of Wednesday or Pugsley during their time at summer camp.
“Students had fun and stayed engaged with this resource”
— Fara N.
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
🖤 Wednesday refuses to perform happiness on demand. When Camp Chippewa's counselors try to force Wednesday and Pugsley into cheerful conformity, Wednesday holds her ground instead of caving to fit in. Students get a sharp example of a character resisting social pressure rather than folding to it.
🏕️ The summer camp plot skewers forced positivity. Camp Chippewa runs on relentless cheer, matching outfits, and group singalongs, and the movie treats all of it as slightly sinister rather than wholesome. It gives students a funny, recognizable target for discussing conformity and peer pressure in their own social worlds.
👨👩👧👦 The Addams parents never try to change their kids. Gomez and Morticia love Wednesday and Pugsley exactly as they are, gruesome hobbies and all, and never push them toward being more normal. That unconditional acceptance stands in sharp contrast to the camp counselors and gives students something to notice about what real support looks like.
🎭 The Thanksgiving pageant becomes a full-blown rebellion. Cast as Pocahontas in the camp's saccharine Thanksgiving play, Wednesday instead leads the other outcast campers in tearing the performance apart. It is one of the movie's most memorable set pieces and a clear payoff for the outsider versus conformity thread running through the camp scenes.
😂 The comedy stays dark without losing its warmth. The Addams family's morbid humor runs through nearly every scene, but the family itself is loving and tight-knit underneath it. Students get comedy that is genuinely funny while the family relationships stay sincere.
🃏 Debbie Jellinsky gives the movie a memorable, comic villain. Joan Cusack plays Debbie as chipper on the surface and calculating underneath, marrying rich men for their fortunes. Her scheme against Uncle Fester gives the plot outside the camp storyline real stakes and comic tension of its own.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Wednesday and Pugsley repeatedly attempt to kill their baby brother Pubert in slapstick, non-graphic ways played entirely for comedy.
- The movie includes comedic violence throughout, including an attempted electrocution and an attempted bombing, none of it graphic.
- There is brief sexual innuendo and dialogue referencing virginity, along with a scene showing mild cleavage.
- A cat is buried alive off-screen and an eagle is shot in one comedic scene.
- No strong language and no drug use beyond characters drinking wine and champagne at social occasions.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
Click your subject below to see how this guide supports it:
📚 English Language Arts Teachers
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons
🏠 Homeschool Parents
🌟 Supporting All Learners A movie gives students a story to follow, and the guide gives them questions to work through as they watch. For students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities, that combination provides a clear focus for the lesson and a concrete way to show understanding. The format can be useful in special education and learning support classrooms, where teachers need activities that give students a defined task during viewing. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
Watching a movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work you can grade: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
