Saturday, August 3, 2013

Things you can learn from commercials and movie trailers....

This summer I have found inspiration just by watching soap operas with my mom. I know it sounds weird and you may have to read that sentence again. How can shows like General Hospital inspire anything speech related? 

Well, it's not about the show itself. It's really about the commercial breaks. We all know that commercials are a great way to pitch a product. Heck, I watched hour long info-mercials during graduate school on my most stressed out nights just for some comedic relief. It's just too bad you can't lose weight by osmosis from those things. 


Food commercials, like the one above, provide a great opportunity to teach the importance of adjectives to our students. I counted roughly 9 adjectives in that 31 second clip. You can turn it into a game. How many adjectives do they use? How many can you write down? What was your favorite? What was the biggest/smallest adjective? Did it make you want to eat there?

You don't have to limit yourself to food commercials either. You can also try game and video game commercials. Look at these two:


All of these videos came from one user on youtube called ProjectAdHand's children's commercial stream. However, you can search for more recent advertisements based on your students' interest. It's amazing what you can do with just a 30 second clip.

You could even try finding movie trailers too. I love this one:


4 comments:

  1. Great idea, I never thought about using the commercials to find the adjectives. I have recommended taping soap operas or kids soap operas and watching with the sound off for body language and emotion identification. Taping them so you can avoid some of the steamy stuff...

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    1. I've never thought about using clips from soap operas. I know there several ABC Family shows that would work well for that too with less risk of the steamy stuff. :)

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  2. Great idea! Will have to give it a try.


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