The Adventures of Hopscotch: Hopscotch Steps Up animated short films and flashback activities provide a comprehensive set of engaging, rigorous resources for literacy instruction. The materials don’t just tell Hopscotch’s story through an animated, narrated video. They use that story to explicitly teach literacy skills. Students eager to learn about Hopscotch’s adventures will receive an instructional lesson about flashbacks as they view the video, which means they can replay it if they need to see or hear it again. Meanwhile, the story’s design will give students many opportunities to practice identifying and analyzing flashbacks. The accompanying activities provide the resources to offer them those chances. Students will be able to engage with them independently or with the teacher and in any instructional model, including in-person or virtual formats. Therefore, the Hopscotch short film and flashback activities not only provide a comprehensive set of materials to teach flashbacks throughout the year but also will make Hopscotch a welcome member of your class.

The Adventures of Hopscotch – Hopscotch Steps Up Short Films: The short film tells the story of Hopscotch, a stuffed panda bear, and how his reflection on a year of adventures helps him solve a problem. The short films come in two formats: the original short film and another that includes flashback instruction. The story itself is approximately 6 minutes long and focuses on the literary element of flashback. It was designed to include numerous teachable moments that will allow students to practice and demonstrate their understanding of flashbacks based on places in the story. With those moments embedded and replay of the explicit lesson available, students will have several ways to develop their skills. To access videos, a Dropbox link (free and no sign-up required) will be provided to easily download the videos in two steps. Directions are included.

Flashback Literacy Lesson Video: The flashback video lesson teaches how to identify and analyze flashbacks through an engaging, animated film. Play the lesson whole class, small groups, or assign it individually. With a variety of uses, its ability to be implemented in any and all instructional models makes it a valuable addition to any teaching toolkit. Students can also replay the video to relearn, review, or refresh this literacy skill.

Flashback Activities: The resource includes 9 different flashback activities at varying levels of difficulty. From graphic organizers to comparison drawings, and more, the variety of flashback assignments will allow you to reuse the flashback video lesson and assign different work to students over the course of a unit, semester, or even year. The materials also include a choice board of all the activities if the intended use is for a mini-unit on flashback. Regardless, the variety of activities will allow for flexible implementation and accommodation for all learners.

In addition to the activities mentioned above, the resource includes EDITABLE templates of ALL the flashback activities (in PDF and PowerPoint formats). These templates will allow you to create assignments for any short story, novel, or text your students are reading in class or at home. This will allow students to apply and practice flashback identification and analysis to another text. The templates offer a range of engaging, rigorous activities aligned to standards to ensure student mastery of this essential literary element.

Implementation Notes: The implementation notes offer suggestions to maximize learning based on the short film and accompanying activities. This includes an outline of how the materials could be used in various instructional models, such as rotation, centers, pull-out groups, and virtual learning. After reading the notes, you will have a better understanding of how you might choose to use the resources to keep students engaged and learning.

Answer Key: Due to the open-ended nature of the assignments, the answer key provides an overview of potential answers for the flashback activities. Individual answer keys do not apply. Part of the strength of analysis questions is the room they leave for students to demonstrate their unique thinking and use textual evidence to support their stance.

Google Slides™ Links: This resource is also technology friendly! It can be utilized in classrooms where computers or tablets are central to instruction because the resource has been adapted for digital completion. The resource includes links for students to complete the student pages in Google Slides™. For instance, students can work with the documents in Google Drive™ or via Google Classroom. With these links, you can have students complete their work online. There are links for every student work page, making the format friendly not only for technology but also trees.

Looking for more Episodes?

Episode 01: Hopscotch Begins

Episode 02: Hopscotch Lands Home

Episode 03: Hopscotch Goes Hiking

Episode 04: Hopscotch Skips a Trip

Episode 05: Hopscotch Meets Henry

Episode 06: Hopscotch & the Lucky Clover

Episode 07: Hopscotch on the Mend

Episode 08: Hopscotch Saves the Day