Curriculum Overview
This site serves as a living companion to the Pointé de Couture curriculum, inviting teachers into a flexible and layered approach to storytelling, analysis, and creative practice. Here, you can explore how the curriculum is organized, the different types of lessons that shape each unit, and the progression of ideas that unfold across the course. Each section is designed to reveal both structure and possibility, helping you move fluidly between planning, instruction, and creative exploration. Use the tabs below to navigate the curriculum’s architecture, or enter a unit to begin shaping your own classroom experience.
How This Course Is Organized
Each unit is structured through a range of lesson types designed to guide students from introduction to exploration, collaboration, and creation. Together, these lessons balance individual reflection with shared inquiry, allowing students to engage with ideas in multiple ways while building toward deeper understanding. From opening experiences that establish context, to exercises, activities, and projects that develop and apply learning, the sequence is intentionally designed to support both creative thinking and analytical growth.
Opening Lessons
The Opening Lesson introduces the central ideas of the unit and invites students into the work. It establishes tone, context, and guiding questions while activating prior knowledge and curiosity. Students begin to encounter the themes they will revisit throughout the unit, often through discussion, observation, or initial creative response. This lesson is designed to create a shared starting point, grounding the class in a common experience before moving into deeper exploration.
Individual Exercises
These activities allow students to explore the unit’s concepts on their own, creating space for individual growth, reflection, and creative thinking. Exercises may include writing prompts, sketching, reflection questions, or focused analysis tasks. The goal is to give each student time to process ideas independently, strengthen foundational skills, and develop personal connections to the material before engaging in collaborative work.
Group Activities
Collaborative tasks designed to help students compare ideas, consider multiple perspectives, and build shared understanding. These activities may involve discussion circles, collaborative storytelling, visual mapping, or problem-solving challenges. Group work encourages communication, active listening, and collective meaning-making while reinforcing key concepts in a dynamic and engaging way.
Projects
Projects are extended assignments in which students apply the unit’s concepts to create something meaningful and complete. These may take visual, written, performative, or multimedia forms depending on the focus of the unit. Projects emphasize synthesis, allowing students to bring together skills, ideas, and personal interpretation into a cohesive final product with clear goals and outcomes.
Extended Lessons
Extended Lessons provide opportunities to deepen and expand the work beyond the core sequence of the unit. These lessons are designed for enrichment, offering additional space for exploration, discussion, or creative response without requiring supplemental materials. They are especially useful for differentiation, whole-class extension, or independent inquiry, allowing students to engage more fully with the themes of the unit at a higher level or broader scope.
How Each Lesson Is Organized
Each lesson is carefully structured to guide both teacher and student through a clear and intentional learning experience. Every component serves a distinct purpose, moving from introduction and instruction to practice, reflection, and extension. This structure allows teachers to adapt lessons to their classroom needs while maintaining a strong sense of progression in inquiry, creativity, and meaning. The components below are used thoughtfully to shape each lesson, though not every element appears in every instance, allowing for flexibility while preserving the integrity of the learning experience.
Purpose
Defines the focus of the lesson and what students are working toward. This section clarifies the central idea, skill, or question that anchors the experience.
Materials
Lists the tools and resources needed to carry out the lesson. Materials are chosen to support accessibility while enhancing engagement and creative exploration.
Presentation
Provides language and framing to introduce the lesson to students in a carefully worded script. This section helps establish tone, context, and curiosity at the start of the experience.
Teaching Instructions
Teaching Instructions
Outlines the steps for facilitating the lesson. These instructions guide pacing, transitions, and key moments of emphasis to support effective delivery.
Student Task
Describes what students are asked to do. This section centers student action, making expectations clear while allowing space for interpretation and creativity.
Group Activity
Details any collaborative component of the lesson. These activities encourage shared thinking, dialogue, and collective problem-solving.
About This Resource (Extended Lessons only)
Provides context for the text, book, or material being used in an Extended Lesson. This section helps teachers understand the origin and significance of the resource.
Why It Matter (Extended Lessons only)
Explains the deeper value of the resource in developing skills, perspective, or understanding. It connects the material to the broader goals of the curriculum.
How To Use It (Extended Lessons only)
Offers guidance for engaging with the resource. This may include prompts, approaches, or ideas that help students interact with complex concepts in meaningful ways.
Whole Class Wrap Up
Brings the lesson to a close through reflection, synthesis, or discussion. This section helps consolidate learning and reinforce key ideas.
Optional Extension
Provides additional opportunities to continue the work. These extensions are designed for moments when engagement is high and students are ready to go further.
How it Ties to the Film
Connects the lesson to Pointé de Couture, highlighting thematic, visual, or conceptual parallels that deepen interpretation.
Extension/Homework
Extends learning beyond the classroom. These assignments reinforce concepts and invite continued reflection or creative application.
How It Connects To the Unit
Situates the lesson within the larger sequence. This section shows how the lesson contributes to the progression of ideas across the unit.
Discussion Questions
Offers prompts to guide conversation and critical thinking. These questions encourage students to articulate ideas, challenge assumptions, and explore multiple perspectives.
Teacher Notes
Provides additional insight, suggestions, or considerations for implementation. This may include differentiation strategies, pacing tips, or contextual guidance.
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 by 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, but 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 by 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 and 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.
Performance Labs
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.
Story Gardens
Story Gardens are where the curriculum becomes your own.
While each unit offers a carefully designed progression of lessons, Story Gardens allow you to gather, arrange, and shape those lessons into a sequence that reflects your classroom, your students, and your teaching style. They are curated pathways through the curriculum, built from the lessons that resonate most with you.
Each garden is intentionally simple in structure and powerful in impact. Designed to be used as a focused learning experience, a Story Garden contains three lessons that work together to create a cohesive arc of exploration, reflection, and meaning-making.
What Is a Story Garden?
A Story Garden is a custom collection of lessons drawn from across the curriculum. Rather than moving through a full unit, you select a small group of lessons and bring them into conversation with one another.
This allows you to:
- Highlight specific themes or skills
- Adapt the curriculum to your pacing needs
- Revisit ideas in new combinations
- Create meaningful, self-contained learning experiences
Each garden becomes a space where ideas are planted, examined, and allowed to grow in new ways.
How to Create a Story Garden
Creating a Story Garden is designed to be quick, intuitive, and flexible. You can begin building a garden in two ways:
- Directly from any lesson page by adding that lesson to a Story Garden
- From your Story Garden dashboard, where you can browse and select lessons
As you gather lessons, your garden begins to take shape. Once three lessons have been added, the experience becomes complete, offering a focused and balanced sequence for students. From there, your garden can be refined and prepared, bringing clarity and intention to the way the lessons connect and unfold.
Sharing Your Garden
When your Story Garden is ready, it can be shared with others.
Shared gardens allow educators to:
- Exchange ideas and approaches
- Discover new ways to use the curriculum
- Build from one another’s creativity
Each shared garden reflects a unique perspective, turning the curriculum into a living, collaborative space shaped by the educators who use it.
Why Story Gardens Matter
Story Gardens invite you to move beyond following a sequence and into shaping one. They create space for experimentation, personalization, and creative control, while still grounding your work in the structure and intention of the curriculum. Whether you are adapting for time, focusing on a specific concept, or simply exploring new connections, Story Gardens make the curriculum flexible without losing its depth. This is where the work becomes yours.