Great Documentaries and Musicals for 3rd-5th Graders

Heh. 1776. I watched that in 10th grade… didn’t say it was a good school.

Along the same lines, how about the Schoolhouse Rock legislative process video (“I’m just a bill / Sittin’ on Capitol Hill…”)

My mother always talks about her English teacher who arranged a series of short films to be shown during study halls at her high school. The one she remembers very well was “The Red Balloon.” Surely that would work for many age groups.

There’s always the original Fantasia – enthralling and haunting when I was in Kindergarten. Although the Stravinsky isn’t the greatest performance.

There was a good PBS series on music a couple of years ago: filmed at Tanglewood, with Seiji Ozawa and Wynton Marsalis. The best episode was the one tracing the roots of the jazz tradtion and trading off the Boston Symphony playing Tschaikowsky’s Nutcracker Ballet suite with Duke Ellington’s arrangement of same.

The Beatles – The Yellow Submarine.
Girard & McKellar – 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. That might be a little too cerebral.

I’m sure I’ll think of some others.

The 5th graders probably would like the spelling bee documentary that was made a few years ago. I think it’s called “Spellbound.” “Hands on a Hard Body” might be too much for a kid’s attention span, but it’s a great documentary on persistence and motivation (it films a competition at a car dealership in Texas in which the person who keeps his or her hand on a new pick-up truck the longest wins the truck — it’s much more compelling than you might think). Get the kids to make bets on who’s going to win, and they might hang in there to the end.

Really Rosie.

But it would be better if you let them perform this…my daughter’s 3-4 grade class did.

I remember back in the 1970s we watched the 1968 Oliver Twist musical, “Oliver!,” in elementary school. Not sure how well it would connect with the students you’re talking about — plenty of the issues are certainly still relevant, but the setting and the format might be a little much to overcome in making those connections. But it really is good and a lot of fun — although Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes gave me nightmares.

Another musical docu. — “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” Children will learn that playing on hit recordings will help them get jobs later in life playing piano in suburban Detroit hotel lobbies.

Disney did updated versions of some musicals for TV a few years ago — “Cinderella,” starring Brandy, for example. And “Annie” with Victor Garber, Kathy Bates, Audra McDonald. They might be too girly but if “A Hard Knock Life” is good enough for Jay-Z… I assume they’re commercially available because it would be unlike the Walt Disney Company to have something not be commercially available.

There’s always Ken Burns to make jazz boring.

“They are socio-economically disadvantaged”

Do you mean they’re poor? Because I too am socio-economically disadvantaged. For example, I don’t have enough money to run around London snorting coke from the dashboard of a Porsche, and I’ve only had two holidays this year.

But seriously, could you narrow the field a little? What are you trying to achieve by showing the documentary? Will it lead to discussion… an assignment… ?

My kids (who are older – 13 and 14) really, really hate musicals although I love them. But they recently sat through the Deborah Kerr / Yul Brynner version of the King and I and actually enjoyed it. I have no idea if it works for younger kids though.

If you want to expose kids to classical music, I recommend a film version of Peter and the Wolf, which is pretty entertaining. There must be a good dramatized version out there somewhere.

‘American Graffiti’ is a great film about transitions from childhood. It has wondrous music -late 50’s rock- and some nascent ‘stars’ at the beginning of their careers. I’ve shown it to school kids who seemed to love it, but I did wonder if this was because they were being asked to watch and not read. Many of them were blind to books. Try it!

Some ideas – please bear in mind that I gauged these against (and often played them for ) my sister when she was younger, and my nieces and nephew, 9 to 15. Some of the stuff was too advanced – which I thought was a good thing, stimulating discussion and encouraging a belief in the value of an adulthood that would lead to understanding.

Also, I am a firm believer in exposing kids to as much as possible, increasing their understanding of the possible.

Lastly, I am at work, and so this is necessarily patchy. :)

1) My Architect. Only tangentially historical, but beautiful nevertheless. Story about broken homes and fatherhood, and greatness and clay feet and history as done by people.

2) Winged Migration. Birds. Birds, birds, birds, birds, birds. Soon they will all be dead. See them now.

3) The Art of the Violin (part of series, I think). Made by the same French Candadian guy, (Bruno somethingorother?), who brought Glenn Gould into the public eye, from which he soon fled again.

4) Best in Show (who said Spinal Tap earlier?). Light relief. Not a documentary.

5) Chasing Buddha. Lucky if you can find it. Story of a peace activist/hippy, who became a Buddhist nun and teaches meditation to LA gang-members on death row. Gritty. Sweet. Beautiful.

6) Sans Soleil. Not really a documentary. Chris Marker. Stimulates discussion and leaves the viewer with imagery that will stay their’s for life. On the subject of Chris Marker, try One Day In The Life Of Andre Arsenevitch. Documentary about film.

7) Strictly Ballroom. Aussie movie about ballroom dancing – not really a musical, but shades the definition. Lovely film.

8) Someone else mentioned 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould. Great idea! Will come across as strange, and ‘weird’. Kids will love it. Make it a double feature with the straight Gould documentary, The Alchemist. Ask questions like, which told you more about Glenn? Isn’t Glenn funny? Isn’t he weird? Why aren’t you crying when he dies? Don’t you understand the world changed FOREVER?

9)Spellbound. Absolutely exquisite, little known documentary about spelling-bees.

10)Genghis Blues. Story of a blind (?) man who taught himself to throat-sing, competed in Siberia and won. Never seen it,despite trying for years. Hard to find a copy in South Africa. Apparently very, very good. Throat-singing will have immense novelty value for kids.

11) The Buena Vista Social Club. Of course.

More to come later.

the promised more:

12) Amandla. Documentary about the role of community-music in the struggle to liberate black South Africans from oppression. Beautiful.

13) On the theme of musicals, why not Company? Not the Robert Altman movie (that’s The Company), but the documentary about the Stephen Sondheim musical.

14) The Laughing Club of India. Mira Nair. Well worth seeing.

rgds again

Last note for now:

I’m assuming this will take place in a formal setting, not a family one.

With the longer stuff, it’s perfectly possible to show it to kids, if you are prepared to waive the usual format for viewing. Depending on your schedule, you might break it up into two or three parts and have a fifteen-minute group discussion at the break.

There are enough natural breaks in any film to make this possible. This revives flagging interest, as it allows the children to set new goals for watching. (Initial goals are simply to find out what’s going on, but after a while, attention drops. New goals can be formed explictly, like figuring out whether the guys in Cuba will ever get to Carnegie Hall, etc.)

It also helps to have a clarification around here – what was that guy doing? etc, for those children who’ve missed the bus. Cookies are indicated. Keep the breaks short though, otherwise the movie’s over.

I also favour and encourage talking during the viewing, even if it slows things down. For kids it’s a social occassion and being forced to sit like little tin soldiers and pretend to pay attention in service of a social formality is just plain dumb. So talking, together, is good. Not too much, but not too little. But this was informal/family viewing.

Btw, the talking is more like faciliation aimed at eliciting. Lots of questions that you let the kids answer themselves. Kids like to explain things to you. Helped me a lot too. :)

Lots of “wow, isn’t that coooooool” openly, and other opinions encouraged too. Break down the audience barrier. Lead by example:). Learn to say “kewl”.

One absolutely obvious choice is “The Sound of Music.”

Might be a bit old for them, but how about the James Burke series “Connections” for the 5th graders? Extremely entertaining look at the development of technology and how it depends on many cross-fertilizations and fortuitous discoveries.

Spent three summers showing movies in the neighborhood park, so I’ve thought about questions like this. My son is only 4 1/2, so I have to project back to what I’d think I liked when I was 10, or forward to what he’ll like in 2010. . . .

Most of what I’d recommend has been proposed: 1776 most definitely, The Music Man, The Wizard of Oz, Spellbound.

The thing is, most movies are far too long for children, especially children in groups. On that score, I’d suggest looking at some Marx Brothers films, most of which are brief, or some screwball comedies. They don’t have the normative value of a musical or a documentary, but I don’t thnk you can ever overestimate the importance of exposing kids to the classics.

FYI, my son loved Fantastic Voyage and The Incredibles, liked season one of Danger Mouse better thanseason two, and thinks Thunderbirds is better to play than to watch. He also knows all the America Rock songs by heart.

Musical documentary … MGM made a compilation film once, IIRC it was called That’s Entertainment! See if you can find that.

Some great ideas here. Especially I like Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom, Amandala, and the Philip Glass stuff.

How about the original Shall We Dance – with Japanese cast and subtitles. Not the execrable remake.

A couple of years ago one of the studios re-released some silent horror films with new scores. How about Dracula with a Philip Glass score performed by Kronos Quartet?

There is a good animated Peter and the Wolf. Also I think there is a film of Leonard Bernstein performing and narrating it for a school audience in the 50s. Not to mention the Warner Bros. Buggs Bunny does Wagner shorts…

Second Ian Cooper’s suggestions. Both Paddle to the Sea and The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes stuck in my mind, and I only saw either one once, in my childhood aeons ago.

I’m not even Canadian.

Harry, I trust that you’ll give us an update on what films you chose and how the screenings went.