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 asks questions students actually want to debate. Would you trade love, color, and music for a world with no war, no hunger, and no suffering? The Giver puts that question at the center of its story and doesn't resolve it neatly. That ambiguity makes for genuine classroom discussion rather than obvious answers.
📖 The source novel is standard reading in middle school ELA. Lois Lowry's novel is widely assigned in grades 6 through 8 across the US. The movie gives teachers a visual companion for the text, a reward for finishing the book, or a standalone entry point for students who haven't read it.
🎨 The transition from black-and-white to color is doing real narrative work. The movie opens in monochrome and gradually introduces color as Jonas receives memories of the world before Sameness. It's a visual storytelling choice that students notice, and that connects directly to the story's ideas about perception, knowledge, and what it means to truly see the world.
⚖️ It explores what happens when a government decides what's best for everyone. The community in The Giver is not run by cruel villains. It's run by people who genuinely believe they've built something better. That distinction makes the movie's critique of conformity and control more interesting and more unsettling than a straightforward good-versus-evil story.
✍️ It gives students real things to write about. The dice-based job assignment, Jonas's role as Receiver, the memories he inherits, and the story's open ending all generate genuine creative and reflective writing. Students have something to actually think through, not just summarize.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
📋 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:
- Violence: A character punches another in the face. The Giver transmits memories of war to Jonas, including a soldier being shot with some blood shown. A baby is euthanized, referred to as being "released," shown in a clinical context.
- Themes: The concept of euthanasia is central to the story. Characters are systematically deprived of emotion, memory, and free choice by their government.
- Romance: Some hand holding, longing looks, and a brief kiss. Adolescent "stirrings" are discussed as something the community chemically suppresses.
- Language: None. The community does not permit cursing.
- Substances: None.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. The Giver is widely taught as a novel in middle school ELA, making the movie a natural companion text for book-to-movie comparison, dystopian literature units, or narrative structure study. The guide covers a full range of writing, from differentiated comprehension and sequencing through to creative narrative and extended essay tasks, with the creative writing activities in Part 3 giving students genuine imaginative work to do alongside their analytical reading.
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers. The multiple choice comprehension set is designed to work well with ESL and ELL students. The differentiated format means ESL learners can work from the same guide as the rest of the class, and the movie's visual storytelling, including its color transitions and heavily controlled dialogue, makes the story accessible even for students still developing their English fluency.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. The guide is print-ready and includes a content page and easy teacher directions, so a substitute can hand it out and run the lesson without any prior knowledge of the movie or the novel. Students work through the comprehension questions during the viewing and move into the creative writing and storyboard activities once it ends.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. The Giver is a natural homeschool choice for families working through dystopian literature or coming-of-age stories. The differentiated question sets give flexibility across ability levels, and the creative writing tasks in Part 3, including the dice-based job assignment and the story continuation, generate the kind of open-ended thinking that works well in a home setting.
💙 SEL Teachers. The Giver is built around SEL themes: emotional suppression, the value of empathy, identity, conformity versus individuality, and the courage to act on what you know is right. The movie asks students to consider what it would mean to live without feelings, and Jonas's journey is fundamentally one of emotional awakening. The guide does not include dedicated SEL activities, but the comprehension questions give students a structured framework for engaging with these themes throughout 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
Two differentiated sets of 35 questions each, covering the movie in chronological order. The first set requires full sentence answers. The second is multiple choice with three options per question, noted in the listing as working well with ESL and ELL students. Answer keys included for both sets.
Part 2: Storyboard and Synopsis
Students create a 9-scene storyboard illustrating key events in chronological order, with a short description for each scene. They then use the completed storyboard as a scaffold to write a structured synopsis of the movie.
Part 3: Creativity and Essay Writing
Three creative writing tasks. First, students roll a dice to be assigned a community job and write a diary entry about their first day in that role. Second, students write about five of the memories Jonas receives from the Giver, with example answers included. Third, students imagine they are Jonas arriving at the house in the snowy forest at the end of the movie, and continue the story by writing about what he finds inside. An extra page is included if needed for this final task.
“I decided to use this as an additional resource during my Population Geography lesson. I know this is typically a ELA assignment but it works well and went along well with my Lesson on population control. The questions were easy to follow along with the movie and most student were able to fill this out with out asking for help. ”
— Samantha H.
“Excellent resource, I use this this to teach government systems in my World Studies classes. Students explain the government systems and how citizens participate in their government.”
— Ryka W.
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.
