Today's Classroom Activities :

Comics in the Classroom

Picture Perfect
Reading/Visual Discrimination Clip comic strips out of various newspapers and cut them up, mixing the panels of different comics all together in a pile. Put the pile in the middle of the table and have students sort them by the main characters. Use related panels to form a story sequence.

Comics for Fun
Reading/Art Collect comics from newspapers and see your school librarian for books of comic strips. Have students read and compare comics. Does the humor come from the text, the illustrations or both? How is humor portrayed through illustrations? Ask the students each to design and create a humorous comic strip of four or six frames. Share and explore what makes a comic strip "work."

Creating Comic Strips
When analyzing comic strips, it is noticeable that each has a different style, point of view, setting, plot, and summary, communicated not only through words, but through illustrations. By creating comic strips, students communicate ideas that cannot be expressed through words alone.

Superhero Comic Strip
Using this lesson students can create a new superhero and write a comic strip about the superhero!

Comic Creator
The Comic Creator invites students to compose their own comic strips for a variety of contexts (prewriting, pre- and postreading activities, response to literature, and so on). The organizers focus on the key elements of comic strips by allowing students to choose backgrounds, characters, and props, as well as to compose related dialogue (shown at left).