By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-page classroom-ready resource.
Three sets of differentiated comprehension questions in chronological order, covering the movie's events. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 55 question set requiring full sentence answers.
- 35 question set requiring full sentence answers.
- 35 multiple choice question set with 3 possible answers each.
- A 9 scene storyboard of what they consider the most important parts of the movie, including a brief description for each scene.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using their storyboard as a guide.
Students write about one of the movie's characters following guided question prompts and include a drawing of their chosen character.
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 Reluctant Hero Learns What He's Capable Of. Bilbo Baggins starts the story with a settled, predictable life and has to be talked into leaving it behind. Watching him grow from someone his companions doubt into someone they rely on gives students a clear example of courage that develops gradually rather than arriving all at once.
🐉 A Kingdom Lost to a Dragon Sets Up the Whole Quest. The dwarves' journey is driven by the loss of their home, Erebor, to the dragon Smaug, and the movie treats that loss as a real motivator rather than a simple plot device. Students get to see how grief over a lost home and a desire to reclaim it can shape an entire group's choices.
📖 A Direct Way to Compare a Novel and Its Movie Adaptation. As an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's novel, the movie gives students a concrete opportunity to see how a written story gets translated to the screen, including which details are kept, expanded, or changed. This works well for any class discussing book to movie adaptation as a skill.
🤝 Belonging and Kinship Run Through the Dwarves' Quest. Thorin's company is bound together by shared loss and a shared goal, and the movie repeatedly returns to the idea of home and loyalty among its characters. Students see these themes play out through the dwarves' interactions with each other and with Bilbo as he earns his place among them.
🧩 A Riddle Game Raises the Stakes Through Wit, Not Just Action. Bilbo's encounter with Gollum is settled through a battle of riddles rather than a fight, and the scene shows a character using intelligence and composure to get out of a dangerous situation. It is a useful example for students of tension building through dialogue and thinking rather than spectacle alone.
⚔️ Large Scale Battles and Chases Test the Company Throughout. The company is pursued and nearly killed several times, by trolls, goblins, and the orc chieftain Azog, giving the movie a steady sense of danger across its run time. These sequences offer a way to discuss pacing and tension in long-form storytelling.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- The movie includes fantasy violence, including a battle in which one character is decapitated and another loses an arm, both shown without graphic detail.
- Characters are frequently chased and threatened by orcs, goblins, and other creatures across multiple sequences.
- The dwarves consume large quantities of food and drink in one early scene, and two characters smoke pipeweed.
- There is no sexual content and no strong language in this movie.
📋 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)
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.
