Film Review (The Joy Luck Club)

I originally wanted to review Memories of a Geisha because I love this movie but soon realized that this film is highly inappropriate for my students in elementary. The cultural aspect is intriguing to me but the content is for students in high school. Instead I chose Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Amy Tan wrote this book in 1989 and in 1993 the novel was adopted in to a film directed by Wayne Wang. This movie is about 4 women who are from China and immigrate to the United States and form a club “The Joy Luck Club” in which they meet once a week to compare stories and talk about their children and grand children.  This movie goes from the present to past with a series of flashbacks. You see China in the 1930’s and 1940’s before the Revolution. China during that time was a very different place.

A way that this movie can be presented to my second graders is under the 2^nd grade language arts standards, which ask students to respond to major events and challenges for the characters and acknowledging different points of view. Students will need a lot of prompting and guidance with this task and will take several days to complete. This movie requires a higher level of thinking and I can use graphic organizer to help organize ideas, make connections, and synthesize information.  For example I can use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast Jing-Mei and her mother Suyuan to assist the students in understanding their relationship.