Family Movie Night Goes on Mission!

Awakened Generation is building a project-based course (see an outline here) that will teach children about naming and mastering their emotions and we need your help! The course will teach a framework for thinking about emotions and identifying them in popular movies, books, and games. Then, students will walk through the process of creating their own comics using emotions and relational situations from their own lives. We’d like to use scenes from many popular family movies in the course, but that’s a ton of work. So that’s where you come in!

Help us find good emotionally-rich scenes in the movies your family loves!

Basically, we’d like families to volunteer to be our “emotion reviewers”. It’s as simple as watching movies you like, taking a few notes about scenes you think are emotionally effective or powerful, and sending us that info so we can build a database of scenes to work with. Here’s the step-by-step process:

STEP 1: Get Your Family on Board

Everyone can contribute their best when they know the purpose of what they’re doing. Here’s some bullet-points to helping your family get on board:

You’ll have fun watching movies and help build an awesome course at the same time. You can show them the cover art for the course here.
As you name movie scenes by their emotions, you’ll grow too. People who are skilled with emotions are happier, healthier, and more successful.
The resulting course will help build happier, more successful, and more resilient people — and you will have invested in a better world.
Anyone who helps on the project will receive special advanced access to the course.

STEP 2: Watch Our Emotional Refresher

Here’s a video short-course that will help refresh ideas about emotions. You can watch it yourself or have the whole family tune in. If you think you’re good to go, skip to the next step.

STEP 3: Watch Your Flick (and Take Notes)

Pop some corn (optional) and cosy up for movie time! As you watch, make note of scenes you find especially emotionally powerful or effective. Watch the reactions of your family to see what’s impacting them.

Make a note of the scene, emotion, and time stamp like this:

17:16 Sam is excited about seeing his friend.

One or two good scenes will help us greatly, but certainly make note of more if you feel inspired (and your family won’t riot from stopping the video).

STEP 4: Post Your Notes

We’re currently collecting notes on movie scenes on the Awakened Generation discussion forum. We’d like each film to be posted as a separate thread. Click the button to post your notes and give your thread a title like “The Incredibles Emotion Scenes”:

New discussion

If you’d rather send your notes to us via email, you can send them to elreview@unusualkingdom.com and we’ll post them to the forum for you.

Thanks for your help! Here’s what we’ll do with your work:

The course we’re writing — Story Power: Emotions that engage and energize! — is currently in development to be launched for a private school this Fall. There it will be used to kick off the school year by setting a healthy learning culture and building effective student teams. While the course focuses on emotional literacy, it also teaches emotional shifting strategies, team dynamics, relational skills, and conflict management techniques.

It can be hard for anyone to talk about emotions — especially young people. Often, when we try to do it, words fail us, or we feel awkward or uncool. By using stories to work with and communicate about emotions, we’re creating a safe and fun context to deal with a heavy subject. Your work will help us create a library of movie scenes that we can reference to help with this process.

Emotional literacy, relationship skills, and conflict management techniques build self-mastery. In our view, self-mastery is the foundation of relational mastery. Relational mastery is the foundation of systemic mastery. What we need today are people that have mastery on all three levels so people, relationships, and system can be healthy and people can thrive. You’re helping us achieve this one movie scene at a time!

Thanks again!
— Awakened Generation Team