By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
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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.
🏚️ A family adjusts to a major life change. After their parents' divorce, Jared, Simon, and Mallory move with their mother into a rundown estate none of them wanted to live in. Their differing reactions, anger, caution, and quiet acceptance, give students a real look at how siblings process the same disruption in different ways.
📖 A field guide becomes the key to survival. Arthur Spiderwick spent years documenting the magical creatures hidden around the estate before disappearing, and his notes are what let his descendants understand and defend against the dangers they now face. The movie treats careful observation and documentation as genuinely useful skills, not just background detail.
👹 A shapeshifting ogre raises the stakes. Mulgarath disguises himself to get close to the family and manipulate them, forcing the children to figure out who and what they can trust. His pursuit of the book drives the movie's tension and gives students a clear antagonist built on deception rather than just brute force.
⚔️ An older sister who takes charge. Mallory is a skilled fencer who repeatedly defends her younger brothers using real physical skill rather than magic. She offers a grounded, competent role model within a story otherwise full of fantastical elements.
👴 A great-aunt who still matters. Elderly Lucinda Spiderwick, initially dismissed by others, turns out to be essential to solving the family's crisis and understanding what happened to Arthur decades earlier. The movie treats her knowledge and memory as valuable rather than something to work around.
🤝 A reluctant son reconciles with his mother. Jared spends much of the movie angry and blaming his mother for the family's situation, but the story resolves with him choosing to stay with her and repairing that relationship. It gives students a window into a child's complicated response to divorce without oversimplifying it.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG.
📋 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)
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Goblins scratch and bite the children, leaving bloody marks.
- A tense climactic battle involves the family using kitchen items as makeshift weapons against goblins.
- Mild language includes words like 'hell,' 'idiot,' and 'stupid.'
- The plot centers on a recent parental divorce and includes a scene where a child learns his father has moved in with another woman.
- There is no sexual content, and no drug or alcohol use in the movie.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. The Spiderwick Chronicles gives an ELA class a fantasy adaptation with a clear narrative arc, distinct character motivations, and a family conflict running underneath the magic. Since it's based on Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi's book series, it also works as a visual companion for a book to movie comparison. The guide includes comprehension questions at three levels of difficulty, along with a storyboard and synopsis writing task and a creative profile writing assignment that pushes students beyond simple recall.
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers. The movie's dialogue moves at a manageable pace and pairs its language with strong visual context, goblins, magical creatures, and clear physical action, that helps students follow the story even when vocabulary is unfamiliar. The multiple choice question set works well with ESL and ELL students, giving them a structured way to follow along and check their understanding.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. Hand it to a sub and walk away. Everything they need is included, with organized comprehension question sets, a storyboard and synopsis task, and creative writing assignments, along with answer keys for the comprehension questions. A substitute can run the session without having seen the movie.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. The Spiderwick Chronicles works well for home learners thanks to its family centered plot and manageable runtime. The guide covers three levels of comprehension questions so a parent can match the difficulty to their student, along with a storyboard and synopsis task and a creative writing assignment imagining an original magical creature. The storyboard activity works well independently, since it only asks students to sequence and describe scenes from memory.
💙 SEL Teachers. Underneath the fantasy elements, this movie is really about how three siblings process their parents' divorce and a forced move away from everything familiar, each reacting differently to the same disruption. Jared's anger, Simon's caution, and Mallory's protectiveness give an SEL class real material for talking about how people respond to change and family stress in their own ways. The guide does not include dedicated SEL activities, but the comprehension questions give students a structured task and keep them accountable during the viewing.
🌟 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 sets of chronological comprehension questions: 45 questions requiring full sentence answers, a 30 question version with 15 removed for a shorter option, and 30 multiple choice questions with 3 possible answers each. The multiple choice set works well for ESL and ELL students. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
Part 2: Storyboard and Synopsis
Students draw a 9 scene storyboard depicting what they judge to be the most important parts of the movie, with a brief description for each scene, then use that storyboard to write a synopsis of the movie.
Part 3: Creative Magical Creature Profile
Students imagine they are an assistant to Arthur Spiderwick and write a profile of a magical creature, either one seen in the movie or one they invent, including a picture of the creature, followed by a second writing task covering the creature's habitat and daily routine, also including a picture of its dwelling place.
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.
