This website is designed to be a companion to the curriculum found in your notebook. Below you will find an overview of the course structure, an overview of each unit, and more about performance labs. To navigate to a specific unit use the menu above or click on the unit from the overview below.
How This Course Is Organized
Each unit follows a clear and consistent structure designed to support smooth teaching, whether you’re leading the class yourself or a substitute or assistant is stepping in. This familiarity helps you focus on student engagement rather than navigating new formats each time. Across all units, you’ll see recurring sections with introductions, materials, presentations, individual exercises, group activities, projects, and performance labs – arranged in the same order to give the curriculum a steady rhythm. This predictability allows the creative work to take center stage while keeping the flow of each lesson easy to manage.
Introduction
This section orients you to the central theme of the unit. It explains the key concepts students will explore, how the topic connects to previous units, and what skills or understandings students should walk away with. The introduction helps you frame the learning experience before diving into instruction.
Materials
A quick reference list of everything needed to teach the unit. This may include worksheets, visual aids, film clips, art supplies, or classroom technology. The section ensures you can gather what you need ahead of time and anticipate any special preparation.
Presentation
Here’s where the magic begins! Each unit provides a guided script or outline for introducing the ideas of the unit. This section describes how to open the discussion, what language to use, and how to lead students into the concepts at hand. It models the tone, pacing, and framing so you can feel confident in delivering the content.
Individual Exercises
These activities allow students to explore the unit’s concepts on their own providing opportunities for individual growth, reflection, and creativity. Exercises may include writing prompts, sketching, reflection questions, or analysis tasks. The goal is to give every student space to process ideas independently, strengthen foundational skills, and prepare for group work.
Reading/Writing
Reading/Writing
These assignments invite students to engage directly with stories, scripts, poems, or informational texts and respond through focused writing. Students may summarize, compare versions, analyze characters, or craft their own narrative pieces based on what they’ve read. The goal is to strengthen comprehension, develop expressive writing skills, and give students a foundation of textual understanding they can draw from in later discussions and projects.
Reflection & Self-Assessment
Reflection & Self-Assessment
Assignments where students connect the unit’s themes to their own experiences, values, or identities. This includes journal reflections, personal interpretation prompts, emotional check-ins, and short written responses that help students internalize the material and track their own growth.
Visual & Creative Response
Visual & Creative Response
Assignments where students respond through drawing, sketching, diagramming, or other visual forms. This includes character sketches, motif drawings, mood boards, personal symbols, or visual responses to film and performance techniques—ideal for students who think best in images.
Analysis & Technique Practice
Analysis & Technique Practice
Assignments where students individually practice an artistic or interpretive skill introduced in the unit. This might include analyzing a scene, breaking down a monologue, experimenting with a camera angle on a phone, annotating story elements, or rewriting a moment from a new perspective.
Group Activities
Collaborative tasks designed to help students compare ideas, negotiate different perspectives, and build shared understanding. These activities may involve discussion circles, collaborative storytelling, comparison charts, or problem-solving challenges. Group work encourages communication and helps students learn from one another’s interpretations. These are designed to be fun, collaborative, and productive.
Games
Games
These are playful, collaborative activities that introduce or reinforce core concepts through movement, creativity, and quick thinking. The focus is on building energy, strengthening group dynamics, and helping students explore narrative ideas in low-stakes, highly engaging ways. Games work especially well as warm-ups or transitions into deeper analytical work.
Story Maps
Story maps
These activities guide students in visually charting how a story unfolds – its characters, settings, conflicts, turning points, and variations across versions. Working together, students construct large shared maps that reveal patterns, divergences, and the “living” evolution of narratives. Story maps help groups see structure at a glance and develop a collective understanding of how stories adapt across time and cultures.
Collaborative Analysis
Collaborative Analysis
A category for group work where students collectively break apart, compare, or interpret story elements. This includes activities like character breakdowns, theme comparisons, visual scene analysis, and cultural/temporal adaptations.
Ensemble Creation
Ensemble Creation
A category for group work where students build or perform something together. This includes creating tableaux, collaborative skits, group-written scenes, or jointly constructing visual artifacts like mood boards or character collages.
Projects
Longer, more developed assignments where students apply the unit’s concepts to create something meaningful. Projects may be visual, written, performative, or multimedia based depending on the focus of the unit. This section provides the purpose, steps, and measurable outcomes for each project and gives each students an opportunity to demonstrate learned concepts.
What’s In Each Unit?
Each unit in this curriculum offers a cohesive lesson arc that guides students through the ideas, principles, and creative techniques woven throughout Pointé de Couture. The units build on one another, moving from foundational concepts of storytelling and adaptation into deeper explorations of style, authorship, character, memory, and performance. Teachers will find thoughtfully structured lessons that blend analysis, discussion, artistic practice, and filmmaking fundamentals in age-appropriate ways. Together, these units create a rich learning journey that helps students understand not only the film, but the larger world of narrative imagination it opens.
Unit One: The Storytelling Machine
This unit introduces students to how stories evolve over time – through translation, adaptation, and cultural reinterpretation. Using Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon (Cinderella) as a foundation, students explore how new storytellers add unique perspectives that transform narratives over time.
Unit Two: Screening, First Impressions, and Layers of Style
In this unit, students will watch Pointé de Couture for the first time and begin exploring how visual and narrative styles shape meaning. They’ll reflect on their immediate reactions and then look closer at the film’s use of animation, color, rhythm, and design to tell Rose’s story. By peeling back these “layers of style,” students will discover how art direction, poetry, and movement all work together to express emotion and authorship. This unit encourages careful observation, curiosity, and the idea that what we see is always more than what is shown.
Unit Three: Understanding Time in Storytelling
In this unit, students explore how filmmakers bend and shape time to tell stories in creative, emotional, and unexpected ways. Through selected scenes from Russian Ark (2002) and Doctor Strange (2016), they’ll compare linear and non-linear timelines and consider how time can move like memory-looping, skipping, and repeating. Students will chart these moments using a time-travel worksheet, engage in guided discussions, and write short reflections on how changing time changes meaning. This unit helps students see that time in art is not just a clock-it’s a feeling, a choice, and a storytelling tool.
Unit Four: Language and Rhythm
In this unit, students explore how words, sound, and movement create rhythm within storytelling. Through poetry, dialogue, and film excerpts from Pointé de Couture, they will examine how language can function like music-setting tone, emotion, and pace. Students will listen closely to the cadence of narration and experiment with writing or performing short rhythmic pieces inspired by the film’s themes of memory, fashion, and identity. This unit reveals how rhythm in speech and structure gives stories their heartbeat and helps audiences feel meaning as much as they understand it.
Unit Five: Authorship, Autobiography & Reflection
In this unit, students explore the connection between authorship and identity-how our own experiences, memories, and emotions shape the stories we tell. Through guided discussion and reflective writing, students consider what it means to be recognized, misunderstood, or unseen as a creator. They’ll examine Pointé de Couture as both an artistic reinterpretation and an autobiographical expression, then create and share short “autobiographical fairy tales” inspired by their own lives. This unit emphasizes that authorship is not only about credit, but about courage—the act of telling one’s truth in one’s own voice.
Unit Six: Portraying Characters
In this unit, students step into the art of performance, learning how actors express emotion, intention, and story through body language and voice. They’ll experiment with portraying two contrasting characters to understand how physicality, tone, and perspective can completely transform a scene-just as the filmmaker of Pointé de Couture embodied multiple roles within one story. Students will explore the key differences between acting for stage and acting for camera, using short improvisations and scene work to discover how each medium captures truth in its own way. This unit emphasizes empathy, imagination, and versatility as the foundation of authentic performance.
Hands-on sessions where students apply storytelling techniques to real artistic processes. Each performance lab connects the unit’s theme to elements of filmmaking and theater – such as blocking, framing, voice, character development, or narrative structure. Students experiment with creative tools, rehearse scenes, analyze narrative choices, and learn to articulate their artistic decisions.