It's Comical

Reading comic strips is a fun way to improve your English skills. Try it! Here are a few sites to get you started:

• Marvel Kids Comics  Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America and many other heroes!
• Kidjutsu Comics for Kids includes a variety and a lot of anime.
• Go Comics All your favorites including Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Ziggy and tons more.
• King Feature Comics Includes Blondie, Popeye, Denise the Menace and numerous others.

If reading comics is good for language skills, creating your own is even better! For this lesson, we made sure we all knew "comic" vocabulary, for example, comic book, comic strip, speech bubble, story board, etc., and then practiced making our own on comic templates. (For lesson plan and blank comic templates, see here).

The next step was to try our hand at creating our own using tools available free online. Some of the sites the students enjoyed using include:

• Make Beliefs Comix
• ToonDoo
• Strip Generator

Here is the grading criteria for the student-generated comics:
 

Comic Strip Grading Rubric

CATEGORY	4	3	2	1
Attention to detail	Comic Strip shows exceptional attention to detail.	Comic Strip shows very good/good attention to detail	Comic Strip shows some attention to detail.	Comic strip shows little attention to detail.
Text Creativity	Student used all original ideas and text.	Most of the text and ideas is original.	A few original ideas, but either little text, or recycled text from other sources.	No original ideas used in text, or no text at all.
Organization	Pictures and text are extremely well organized and easy to understand.	Pictures and text are mostly well organized and easily understandable.	Pictures and text are only somewhat organized. Ideas come across as a bit chaotic.	Organization of material is confusing to the reader and comic looks as if it were haphazardly thrown together.
Clarity and Neatness	Comic Strip is easy to read and all elements are clear.	Comic Strip is easy to read and most elements are clear.	Comic Strip is somewhat easy to read and some elements are clear.	Comic Strip is hard to read and few elements are clear.
Spelling & Proofreading	No spelling or grammar errors	No more than 1 spelling/grammar error	No more than 3 spelling/grammar errors	Several spelling/grammar errors
Use of Time (Active Participation Grade)	Used time wisely.	Mostly used time wisely.	Sometimes used time wisely.	Wasted time in class and/or didn’t turn comic in on time.

Grading Table:
24-23 points = 10/9
23-18 points = 8/7
17-12 points = 6/5
Below 12 points = 4/3/2/1

The fluency students came up with some very clever dialogues and characters, and then got to work creating. Below you will find just a sample of the many--Enjoy!

By Danielle and Silvy (part 1)

By Danielle and Silvy (Part 2)

by Tara

by Noah

by Richard

by Rosalie

by Eijse