By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 6-page classroom-ready resource.
Two sets of differentiated comprehension questions in chronological order. Answer keys are included for both sets.
- 15 question set requiring full sentence answers.
- 15 multiple choice question set with three possible answers each, which also work well with ESL, ELL, and kindergarten students.
This part covers two activities. An answer key is included for the word search.
- Writing sentences using each letter from the word SUPERWORM as a prompt, with an example given for the first letter, then writing about a time they felt happy, sad, or excited while watching the movie.
- A word search with 15 words to find, five of which require students to answer a clue before locating the word.
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.
🪱 Makes Kindness Visible. Superworm rescues a baby toad from being run over and pulls a beetle out of a well, giving students clear, concrete examples of what helping someone looks like. Each rescue is small in scale but easy for young students to follow and talk about afterward.
🦋 Shows What Being Overlooked Feels Like. Butterfly quietly helps make several of Superworm's rescues possible, but he is given all the credit without realizing she has been left out. It gives students a gentle, age appropriate way to talk about noticing others and sharing credit fairly.
🦎 Treats Greed as the Clear Problem. Wizard Lizard's greed for treasure is what drives him to kidnap Superworm, and the movie never presents that greed as anything but a flaw. Students get a straightforward point of contrast between Wizard Lizard's selfishness and the garden creatures' teamwork.
🤝 Builds a Rescue Around Teamwork, Not One Hero. When Superworm is captured, it is Butterfly who organizes the other insects into a rescue plan rather than waiting for another single hero to appear. Students see the value of collective effort in a story that had, up to that point, centered entirely on one character's strength.
🎬 Keeps the Story Simple and Watchable for Young Students. At 25 minutes with a clear, linear plot, the movie suits an audience of younger students who benefit from a story they can follow without getting lost. Its animated, low intensity style keeps the peril mild throughout.
📚 Connects Directly to a Well Known Picture Book. The short film is based on Julia Donaldson's popular book of the same name, giving teachers an easy way to pair the film with the book it came from. Students familiar with Donaldson's other stories have an immediate point of connection.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated U.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Several characters face brief moments of peril, including a toad nearly being hit by a truck and a beetle falling down a well, but Superworm rescues them before any harm occurs.
- Some slapstick moments include characters falling into mud or being caught in nets, poked with a plastic fork, and thrown into a rubbish dump.
- There is no sexual content, language, or substance use anywhere in the movie.
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
💙 SEL Teachers
🌟 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.
