Stage to screen: The Wizard of Oz

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (From stage to screen mini-series, episode 171) is a short documentary about The Wizard of Oz and how it changed on its way from the page to the stage and the screen. It starts with L. Frank Baum's book of 1900 (the storm, Dorothy and Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion, the Emerald City), then the 1902 musical in Chicago and New York, then the 1939 film, where the farm in Kansas is brown and white and Oz is in colour, and the film-makers changed the silver shoes to red. It ends with the ruby slippers today: the 2005 theft, the FBI find thirteen years later and the pair in a museum in Washington, D.C. No grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 9 on facts and 1 on vocabulary (the ruby slippers). The study topic is how one story travels from the page or the stage to the screen, and what changes on the way.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (W. W. Denslow's 1900 picture of the four friends on the yellow road, a drawing of a silver shoe and a red shoe, a photo of a ruby slipper in the museum), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Which shoes do you prefer: the silver shoes or the ruby slippers?). Teachers may want to check beforehand that learners can read dates. The pack's key words explain the new words (silver, storm, scarecrow, wizard, colourful, film-maker, shine, pair, thief, steal, sequin).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged artistic-languages-and-messages (axis 5, "Langages et messages artistiques"; objet d'étude "Des planches aux plateaux de cinéma"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.