School Spirit

Having a webcomic of my own, drawing characters and inventing little adventures involving them is a nice little hobby of mine. Being a teacher, I’m required to get the kids writing short stories and things as well. More than that, I’m supposed to give the kids the understandings of how to write these short stories and various written texts they’ll undertake. Somehow, hopefully, for the best outcomes all ’round, I’d like to make these lessons entertaining and interesting for the kids as well as something they’ll learn and remember.

Another site on the web featuring webcomics and classrooms has a similar sort of lesson set out. Suitably named Comics in the Classroom, it has a few other ideas as well. While their lesson plan is nice and proper and written out in the appropriate way and gives you the goals, aims and outcomes all nicely stated… I tend not to work that way. I didn’t write this one up nice of professionally. I didn’t spend two weeks or so planning the lesson. I just felt the kids needed to know how to use quotation marks properly (it’s actually part of the 3/4 curriculum, as we found upon a closer reading!) and to me, it seemed colouring in a comic strip that their teacher actually drew would have been much more entertaining for the kids.

Yes, okay. It was a little bit of self satisfaction for me too, but overall my intentions were noble…

So I’ve been combining the two, and the latest successes are here for anyone who wishes to share them. Or, possibly, is looking for a way to teach those kids how to use quotation marks correctly. So I give to you the School Spirit Quotation Mark Lesson Plan! Featuring the characters from the School Spirit webcomic, and the work of this year’s grade threes and fours.

Here is a selection of four panels I chose from my collection of School Spirit bits and pieces. I blew these up to a size where two would fit onto an A3 page. Then, I cut them up. Put them up on the board in a random order, and the kids were set the task as a group to decide which order they would need to be in for the story to make sense. This is a good little sequencing activity too. In this case, they realised that Cody (the feller with the hat) had to reach up to the bars before he could get his legs up, and had to have his legs up before he could hang from them. Later, on a closer look, they also realised they were correct to have them in that order, as his hat falls off during the story, and this sequence allowed for that. So far, all good, and the kids are getting into their heads that stories need to follow a set sequence.

Next, we gave Casper and Cody (the two boys) words for them to say in each panel, and surrounded these with speech bubbles, noting that these allow us to see what each person is saying. All well and good, and we had some fun deciding what was happening in the story and then putting the words in their mouths, so to speak. Here came the fun bit for the kids.

‘Okay, guys, here’s a small version of the strip for you. Off to your seats and write your own words for the boys to say! Don’t forget your speech bubbles, okay? When you’ve written it all out, have fun and colour it in! Make it look rip-snorter because by the end of the week they’ll be hanging on the wall.’

Off they went, and there was the first morning filled with happy, enjoyable yet hopefully meaningful education!

Next day, we brought our comic strips back out to our tables and gathered on the floor in front of our large version from the day before. Here the kids were introduced to quotation marks, and learned that they are put either side of the sentence a character in a story says. That was easy. We wrote the first piece of dialogue out on the board and put talking marks either side. What’s missing?

Yep, we don’t know who’s saying the words. After a quick brainstorm of interesting ways we could say ’said’, we added ’said Casper’ at the end. What’s missing now?

Yep, the rest of the talking. Where do we write that? At the end of the first one? No, we leave a line so we can tell someone else is saying something. Yes, just like starting a new paragraph. Got that? Great. Off we went and together rewrote the speech bubbles out in about eight lines of dialogue, complete with quotation marks and ’said Casper or Cody, etc’ tacked on the end. Missing anything now?

No? Actually, kids, we are. Just inside the last quotation mark, just before we tell the reader who’s saying the words, we have to include a comma, or a question mark or an exclamation mark if your speech bubble has one. Why? Just so we can remember to have a small pause as we’re reading, and because, well, look in another book and you’ll see that’s just the way we write it. Okay? Good.

Yep, they seemed to get all that pretty well. Here came the kicker. ‘Okay, kids. Here’s some practice writing paper, off you go and write out your speech bubbles just like we did here! Once it’s all editted and checked, you can write it out neatly on some display paper and put it with your comic up on the wall. Sound good? Great. Hit the tables!’

Off they went, and bugger me, it worked! To the right are two examples of finished pieces taken from the wall that afternoon. About half of the kids completed the entire activity. The rest will use time next week to finish them off. The great news, though, was that each kid found they could follow the steps and included the quotation marks, wrote who was saying each line, and even remembered the comma on most occasions.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, eh? The next step is giving them a writing activity in the next week or so where they have to put this into practice. Then we’ll see if it’s still swimming around in their heads!

Tags: writing, lesson plans, comics, teaching