By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
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.
🕰️ The alternate 1999 makes King's impact concrete rather than abstract. When Miles brings King forward to the present and disrupts the timeline, the movie shows what 1999 actually looks like without the Civil Rights Movement: segregated schools, discrimination operating openly, and none of the legal protections that King's campaigns produced. Students can see the specific difference his life made rather than being told it.
📜 The movie uses real documentary footage alongside the animation. Archival images and recordings of King's speeches are integrated into the story, so students are watching both a fictional time-travel adventure and real historical footage. The blend gives the movie a grounding in actual events that a purely animated retelling would not have.
👦 Miles meets King at multiple points across his life. The time-travel structure takes students through King's childhood home, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham campaign, and the March on Washington. Each stop gives students a different vantage point on King's development as a leader and on the specific campaigns that defined the Civil Rights Movement.
👥 The ensemble of student characters includes a white bully and a Latinx classmate. All four students end up at the March on Washington, each of them changed by what they have witnessed. The movie uses this to show that the Civil Rights Movement had implications beyond the Black community, and that the bully's journey toward understanding is as much part of the story as Miles's.
🎙️ The voice cast brings genuine weight to the historical figures. King is voiced by actors including Samuel L. Jackson, with additional performances from Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, James Earl Jones, Angela Bassett, and Diane Keaton. The production values, including a Motown soundtrack and an Emmy nomination, give the movie a seriousness appropriate to its subject.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated G.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Period-accurate racist language is used throughout, including slurs.
- King's assassination is heard but not shown. A character smokes a cigarette briefly.
- Documentary footage shows police attacking protesters with dogs and water hoses.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. Our Friend, Martin works well for ELA classes at the upper elementary level studying historical narrative, perspective, or the relationship between storytelling and historical events. The time-travel structure gives students a clear viewpoint character to follow, and the diary writing task in Part 3 asks them to inhabit Miles's perspective and write from inside the experience they have just watched. The guide supports comprehension and analytical writing, with differentiated question sets for mixed-ability classes.
🌐 Social Studies Teachers. Our Friend, Martin covers the Civil Rights Movement directly, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Birmingham campaign through to the March on Washington. Social Studies teachers at the upper elementary and middle school level covering US history, civil rights, or the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. will find the movie a clear and accessible visual companion to classroom study. The guide does not include Social Studies-specific activities beyond comprehension, but the comprehension questions track the historical events depicted in the movie, and the extension questions in Part 2 push students toward higher-level analysis of King's significance.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. The guide is self-contained and requires no setup from the class teacher. The three differentiated question sets cover a range of ability levels without additional preparation, and the extension questions and diary writing task give students structured independent work to continue after the viewing.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. Our Friend, Martin works well for home learners at the upper elementary level studying US History or the Civil Rights Movement. The differentiated question sets give families flexibility to match the activity to the learner, and the diary writing task in Part 3 makes a strong standalone writing project.
📜 History Teachers. Our Friend, Martin is a direct teaching tool for US History classes covering the Civil Rights Movement at the elementary and middle school level. The movie takes students through key historical events in chronological order, with documentary footage integrated into the animation to anchor the fictional story in real history. The guide's comprehension questions follow the historical sequence, and the extension questions in Part 2 ask students to analyze King's decisions and their consequences.
🌟 Supporting All Learners Movie guides can be a wonderfully calm fit for students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities. The structured format gives every student a clear purpose during viewing, easing uncertainty and allowing them to engage at their own pace. If you teach in a special education or learning support setting, you may find this guide a gentle and practical resource. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-page classroom-ready resource.
Part 1: Comprehension Questions
Three differentiated question sets covering the movie in chronological order, all with answer keys included. Students can complete 30 full sentence answer questions, 20 full sentence answer questions (with 10 removed from the longer set), or 20 multiple choice questions with three possible answers each.
Part 2: Extension Discussion Questions
Ten higher-level questions asking students to analyze the movie's themes, King's decisions, and the broader significance of the Civil Rights Movement. Students complete these individually or in pairs before sharing with the class. Can also be used as a springboard for further activities about the civil rights movement.
Part 3: Diary Writing
Students imagine they are Miles and write a diary entry recounting their experience of bringing Martin Luther King Jr. forward to the present and witnessing the changed timeline, describing all the things that were different.
“Used it with the movie and I could see how it all had a big impact on my students.”
— Heidi K.
“This was the perfect compliment to one of my favorite ways to teach about Martin Luther King, Jr. The format was very easy to use, and the fact that there were a couple different options for the extended questions was perfect. Thank you for creating this!”
— Kathleen H.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
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 that can actually be assessed: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
