‘The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.’

-Mark van Doren

That means getting your students out there in the real world and finding things they can relate to (with a certain filtering). One of the things I turn to is…

…comics!!!

 

Comics can be used to teach content, values, to coax reluctant readers, for fun and also be the outcome of students’ work. Here is an example, where, to begin with, 6th grade students from the ΣΤ1 class in our school wrote the story of Daedalus and Icarus as a dialogue.

The students worked in teams to produce dialogues based on the story of Daedalus and Icarus. They also practised the Simple Past and the Simple Present. This is the first draft.

 

     

After they wrote the final draft of the dialogues, it was time for them to show their artistic talents! At least one student in each team was willing to carry out the task of the actual drawing, but all the rest helped with their ideas and with how the text should be placed.

Previously, the students had been introduced to the terminology of comics and had been given some tips that would help them draw their ideas down to paper. With the aim to encourage creativity in mind, computer assisted comic making was not given as an option. For more information about comics in education, visit http://athenscomicslibrary.gr/εκπαιδευτικα–προγραμματα

Only two teams out of the four managed to finish in time (2 teaching hours), but the students of the other two promised to finish next time… You know how it goes! Of course, they all wanted to do more!

This was the result:

The Super kids team (Lydia, Theodosis, Rafaela and Mariefi) came up with this:

 

And the Koroivos fans team (Dimitris, Maria, Panayiota and Makis) collaborated on this:

 

Don’t you think my students are talented? Here’s a video I made to show their work (or, you can click here):

 

 

Enjoy!