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.
🚂 It is built around a single, sustained question. Whether Hero Boy still believes in Santa drives every scene, giving students a clear throughline to follow even as the movie adds new characters and settings along the way.
📖 It expands a short picture book into a much longer story. Chris Van Allsburg's original book is brief and quiet. The movie adds an entire journey's worth of incident and spectacle, giving students a concrete case for comparing how a story changes when it moves from page to screen.
🎢 It moves through a series of escalating, fast-paced sequences. A speeding train, a runaway railway car, and a crossing over cracking ice all build tension in quick succession. Students can track how each sequence raises the stakes before the story settles at the North Pole.
🤝 It introduces a small group of children with different attitudes toward belief. Hero Boy, Hero Girl, and Know-It-All each respond differently to the journey and to each other, giving students distinct characters to compare and contrast.
❄️ It offers a clear example of a holiday story built on imagery rather than plot alone. Northern lights, herds of reindeer, and an enormous workshop at the North Pole give the movie a strong visual identity that students can describe and respond to in writing.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated G.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Several sequences involve sustained peril, including a speeding train, a runaway railway car, and a crossing over cracking ice.
- One scene shows a mysterious figure manipulating a puppet to frighten a child in a dark room full of broken, talking toys, which some younger or more sensitive students may find unsettling.
- No language, sexual content, or drug and alcohol use is present.
- Some parents have noted that younger children who still believe in Santa can find the movie's questioning of that belief, along with its darker visual moments, more unsettling than the G rating suggests.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. The Polar Express suits ELA classes studying book adaptation, sequencing, or descriptive writing. The guide covers a wide range of tasks, from comprehension through to storyboard based synopsis writing and a creative recount essay, with the comprehension questions available in three differentiated sets.
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers. The multiple choice comprehension questions are noted as suitable for lower grade and ESL or ELL students, giving them an accessible way to follow the story alongside its strong visual storytelling.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. The three sets of differentiated comprehension questions, paired with a clear part by part structure, make this guide easy to hand to a substitute teacher to run with little preparation, particularly around the Christmas holiday period.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. The Polar Express is a natural home learning choice in the weeks before Christmas. The three-level comprehension sets give a parent flexibility to match the questions to the child's level, and the recount essay and favourite character task in Part 3 gives the session a creative writing focus that extends naturally beyond the movie itself.
🌟 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 16-page classroom-ready resource.
Part 1: Comprehension Questions
Three differentiated sets of questions in chronological order, 35 full sentence questions, a reduced 25 question version, and a 25 question multiple choice set, the last of which is also noted as suitable for lower grade and ESL or ELL students. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
Part 2: Storyboard and Synopsis
Students draw a six scene storyboard of what they consider the most important moments in the movie, with a brief description for each scene, then use that storyboard to write a synopsis of the story.
Part 3: Recount Essay and Favourite Character
Students describe and draw their favourite character from the movie, writing about that character's personality and what they liked or disliked about them, then write a recount essay imagining themselves invited onto the Polar Express journey.
Part 4: Word Search Puzzle
A word search with 15 words to find, five of which require students to first answer a clue before locating the word, included as a lighter activity to close out the unit.
“This gave students something to work on while watching the movie to keep from talking. Students enjoyed it and I wished I'd found it years ago!”
— Kera K.
“My students loved this resource! I found it to be very engaging and will be using it in the future.”
— Makenzie R.
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.
