Original English comic

In my city, this is part of a city-wide English comic contest. This activity was created to give students an opportunity to start writing in class, and continue out of class if they so desire. However, it can be easily adapted to include certain grammar points, or just as a creative writing exercise! I found my students really enjoyed the opportunity to express themselves creatively, so I wanted to share.

1) Students choose to make comics by themselves or in pairs.

2) The teacher shows an example comic. Read the example together and prompt students to guess the meaning of certain key parts first in pairs/small groups, then as a class.

3) Have students think of good points from the example comics. (At this point, I used Loilonote because our students are most comfortable using it, and it works well for collecting individual students' opinions)

4) Brainstorming the 5W's: I made a Loilonote quiz (can also be done on paper or whiteboards) to do a quick* brainstorming session for students to think up answers to the following questions:

Who? --- characters
What/Why? --- theme
Where? --- setting
When?--- time period

*I really emphasized that this should be quick to just jot down any ideas that come to their minds first!

After students submitted their answers, we went over some interesting ideas as a class and got some laughs out of the quirky ideas submitted!

5) For the remaining time, students start writing their comics.

Variation:
I did a similar lesson in my special needs class. We adapted the lesson by showing different example comics and doing the attached worksheet instead of steps 3~4 to guide students through the brainstorming.

Files:

Small files

Comic class brainstorming.pub (821 KB)

Comic class brainstorming.pdf (372 KB)