I had my own boys watch "Sergeant York" yesterday as part of our World War I unit. Even though I'm co-schooling U. S. history with Hannah's kids, we do some extras separately — there just isn't time for us to have the kids watch movies together. I need that time for instruction.
I really only had one week to cover WWI from an American-history point of view — we will also get it in world history this year, and we'll go more into the causes and such when we cover it there.
I had never seen "Sergeant York" before. It was released in 1941, so obviously we've got a patriotic, sign-up-to-fight kind of tone. Good movie, though. The climax of the movie (Tennessee corporal nearly-single-handedly kills 20 Germans and captures 132 prisoners, significantly aiding the Allies near the very end of the war) would be rather unbelievably unrealistic except that it really happened. My 10-year-old and almost-seven-year-old were both very excited by the basic training and war scenes and wanted to see them again and again, and they didn't much mind the other stuff (maybe 2/3 of the movie) that sets up the characters, explains Alvin York's conversion from hellraiser to church-goin' man, considers religious objections to fighting, and in the end gets him home from the ticker tape parades to his Tennessee hills.
I really need to use more classic old cinema as kid-movies. We have a nice collection of Marx Brothers DVDs which our children really enjoy, but I haven't gotten much into the war-movie genre. It's very appealing to my little boys at least, even in black-and-white — and it's gotta be better than Pokémon movies.
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