Comic Strips

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Today I'm holding down the fort and blogging on my own because Anne is in the city watching her daughter run a race. I'm going to write about comic strips because I've become intrigued with them in the past few weeks.

As you know comic strips and comic books have been around forever, and in recent years graphic novels have become popular reading material for some kids.  Truthfully, I've never paid much attention to that genre because I don't care for it.  I think comics are difficult to read, the font is small and unappealing, and the illustrations are way to busy for my taste.  However, lately I've been hearing about the effectiveness creating comics can have on students when they are trying to demonstrate their knowledge.  Plus, it's fun and engaging!

When I attended the Smekens 2014 Literacy Retreat in June,  Kristina Smekens stressed the significance of students recomposing the nonfiction information they read.  Steve Moline, who wrote I See What You Mean: Visual Literacy K-8, Second Edition, defines recomposing as, "...simply reading information in one format and summarizing it in another format."  Allowing students to recompose their knowledge in a comic strip format is a great way to help them visualize the information, as well as solidify their learning.  A comic strip allows students to visualize the information chronologically so it makes sense.  Kristina Smekens supplied us with a hard copy of a comic strip that students could write on and illustrate. You could easily create your own version using Pages or Word.

This sounded fun, but it wasn't until I read the article by Susan Stephenson titled Use Comics To Develop Literacy that I was convinced I had to try using them with my students.  In fact, I decided to practice this idea with some of my tutoring students. Our district provides us with Comic Life, which is a cool web-based site that allows students to create comics.  Unfortunately, mine is not working at the moment, but the Stephenson article gave me loads of other comic creating websites.  I chose to use Pixton, which is free and very easy to use.  The best thing about it this particular site is that students' comics can be saved and completed at a later date.  Many of the other comic sites did not have that feature.

The screen shot below is of a comic that one of my students and I created about World War II.  This student is a third grader who is fascinated by this topic.  I wanted him to recompose his vast background knowledge, as well as the new knowledge he gained from what we had read together.  We had so much fun, but I learned/remembered a few things.  I needed to teach him that comic strips are like stories and must make sense.  I also remembered that it is important to allow the students to explore the tools before having them begin a project.  I think I was so excited all my teaching common sense flew out the window!

Remember, I did not give him a chance to explore with the cool tools, so he explored as we worked.  That's why scenes don't make a lot of sense!

Coincidentally, as I was searching for hands-on projects to do with the topic of World War II, I came upon an awesome site.  One of the fun activities was for students to create comics about the war.  I love when things click and come together!  If anyone has to teach about WWII, I suggest checking out this site.  It's awesome.

This site is so cool I wish I taught about this war.

Anne and I are in the middle of writing a TpT lesson plan for the first story we are going to read with our third graders.  It is called Charlie McButton Loses Power.  We are so excited about comic strips that we are including a comic strip activity in the lesson! The activity will require students to make inferences and respond to the main character, Charlie McButton, as he deals with his difficult situation throughout the plot.  We will let you know when our lesson plan is completed in case you would like to check it out.

I have a feeling we are going to find many ways to incorporate comic strips into our curriculum.  It was well-received by my tutoring student, and I anticipate my two other students will find it fun and engaging, as well.  I'll keep you posted.

Enjoy your weekend!  Summer is going fast!

Kim and Anne

Thin and Thick Questions

Friday, July 18, 2014

If you remember, last week Kim was at the Steve Spangler Science in the Rockies workshop.  It was beyond fabulous.  If you ever get a chance to attend, grab it.  The ideas, friendships, connections, and supplies received were beyond any other workshop, as well as Kim's expectations.  We plan on incorporating many of his science ideas and concepts throughout the school year.  Be looking for them on the blog.  Below is a video of one of the many interactive, hands-on science activities everyone participated in.  Kim is walking on broken glass.

Kim was back to tutoring the day after returning home from Colorado.  The great thing about tutoring is that we can try out new ideas in a one on one setting.  Teaching the students to write thick and thin questions is not new for us, but we found new tools and a great article that will help make these lessons more effective.  We had two different purposes for teaching questioning to our students.  One student was consistently asking thin questions while reading independently.  They were questions that were unimportant to the plot of the story.  It was difficult for this student to decide what was important enough in the story to ask questions about.  Other students were having difficulty interpreting questions and answering them with depth and understanding.  

To review the concept of thick and thin questions we showed the following YouTube video and then a powerpoint.  The kids seemed to like them and began to decipher the difference between the two types of questions.

                                       

We then provided the students with question stems to use to write thin and thick questions as we read.  

Question Stems Given To Students

Kim found a great article on Edutopia about questioning. This article gave  great examples of questions that help kids think on a deeper level. You might want to check it out!

Hopefully you will find these resources helpful in the upcoming school year.

Kim and Anne

We Are Finally Back!

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Phew!  Today we are so grateful we had time to catch our breath and get back to blogging.  It feels great!  It has been nonstop since the end of the school year, with shutting our classrooms down, math curriculum work, tutoring, and going to another awesome Smekens' workshop.  On a personal note, Anne's daughter had a baby boy on July 1st.  This is Anne's first grandchild.  So, for her, things just got busier.

We finally put up a free TpT activity.  It's called Adverb Headband Hunt.  This is a game that was inspired by the popular game Hedbanz.  We played this game last year with our second graders and they loved it.  This coming year, we will play it again, but with our third graders.  We found out at the end of the school year that we would be moving up to third grade.  We are thrilled!  This brings us back to our looping and multiage days where we would always switch between second and third grade curriculum.

Once again, we attended a fabulous Smekens workshop. This one was the SmekensRetreat. Once again, we recommend going. We received tons of ideas for reading and writing, up-to-date research, valuable resources, and even free give-aways! We are trying out some of these ideas this summer with the kids we are tutoring. 

One of our tutoring students chose to read Cracked Classics X Marks the Spot by Tony Abbott. This book is based on the classic Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. We decided to use the familiar summary of Somebody Wanted But So Then (SWBST). This strategy was mentioned during the Teaching Visualization of the Text during the conference. We know teaching the strategy of visualization has been around forever, but at the conference, they breathe new life into old strategies. An activity to go with SWBST was called Digital Stories. We decided to incorporate that with Wixie. Here is the project.

We got more ideas from the session called Deepening Understanding with Nonfiction Notebooks. We have always used nonfiction notebooks as we've taught social studies and science, but this session had a bunch of cool ways to record informational text. On a side note, one of their resources is a book titled, I See What You Mean  by S. Moline. We are planning to order and read this book this summer. In a tutoring session, we used their idea of using boxes and color codes to record, and organize information. They also showed how you use arrows to connect information. We read a nonfiction book about pirates, took notes, and then connected to our fiction. We noticed that the authors of Cracked Classics, and Treasure Island portrayed pirates in a realistic manner. They must have done research.

Next week, Kim is going to Colorado for a Steve Spangler Science Conference. Stay tuned for some new science activities, hopefully fun ones to kick off the new school year!

Happy Fourth!

Kim and Anne