Mrs. Thompson's 6th grade class has been learning about microorganisms. She showed me the notes that all of her students had and a chart that she was going to test them on. I thought it would be fun if the students chose one of the images from their list of microorganisms and turned it into a comic book character.
They would create a short story through a comic strip addressing one of the 3 aspects of that microorganism (relative size, food source, or the environment that it lives in).
We started out talking about all of the different kinds of artists that exist in the world. There are painters, sculptors, graphic designers, architects, forensic artists, etc., but specifically we were going to talk about comic strip artists. We also talked about graphic novels and comic strips and how they tell a story using words and sometimes not using any words at all. I showed them a few different examples of how a variety of frames are used and how they flow from one image to the next to tell a story.
We analyzed how they used space and where they placed speech bubbles to determine the order that the story should be read. After explaining their assignment in relation to microorganisms, they started out by sketching their comics in pencil.
