By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 17-page classroom-ready resource.
Three sets of differentiated comprehension questions in chronological order. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 42 question set requiring full sentence answers.
- 30 question set requiring full sentence answers (a trimmed version of the first set).
- 30 multiple choice question set with three possible answers each. The multiple choice set also works well for ESL and ELL students.
This part covers two activities.
- A character mind map where students choose a character from the movie and identify core traits, relationships with other animals in Zootopia, and their role in the story.
- Eight detailed questions guiding students through the character's motivations, strengths, and flaws.
- A nine scene storyboard illustrating pivotal events from the movie, with a short description for each scene explaining its main idea.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using their completed storyboard.
A just for fun word search with 15 words or connected words. Students first unscramble 10 words, then solve 5 clues for the rest before finding them in the puzzle. Answers are included.
“This resource provided a way of gauging my students attentiveness while watching Zootopia 2 in science class to go along with our current unit.”
— Gabby Z.
“This resource was super helpful teaching this topic in my middle school Life Skills class!”
— Peighton W.
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.
🐍 Challenges assumptions about who's dangerous. The movie's mystery hinges on the idea that snakes have been feared and excluded from Zootopia for decades based on reputation rather than evidence. Watching Judy work through her own instinctive suspicion of Gary gives students a clear, concrete example of prejudice in action.
🏙️ Builds a mystery around a city's hidden history. Judy and Nick's investigation uncovers a buried reptile district and a founder of Zootopia who was written out of the city's official story. Students get to watch a mystery plot double as a lesson in how history gets shaped by who gets to tell it.
🤝 Shows a partnership working through real conflict. Judy and Nick's friendship is tested by miscommunication, mistrust, and disagreement over how far to push the investigation. Their arguments and eventual honesty give students a realistic model of what repairing a strained relationship looks like.
🕵️ Wraps its themes inside a fast paced buddy cop story. High speed chases, a citywide manhunt, and a framed for a crime plotline keep the mystery moving. It gives students a story with momentum and stakes to hang the deeper themes on.
💪 Centers character strengths students can name and discuss. Judy's courage and refusal to give up on an unpopular theory, Nick's growth from cynicism to honesty, and Gary's persistence in defending his family are all built into the plot. These traits give students specific moments to point to rather than abstract descriptions.
🐊 Introduces a new part of Zootopia's world. The movie expands the city with Marsh Market, a hidden reptile community pushed to the margins of Zootopia. It gives students a new setting that ties directly into the movie's questions about who gets included in a shared society and who gets left out.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Includes high speed chases, peril, and a scene where a fire is deliberately set to smoke out or potentially harm people inside.
- Characters are injected with snake venom during the story, and one character is bitten.
- A death is shown in a flashback, though no character dies on screen during the main story.
- No profanity is used, only mild insults and made up euphemisms.
📋 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
🌐 Social Studies 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.
