Teacher Information

Over the last couple of weeks, the LTC has been working with first grade to create their very own comics! We were looking for just the right project to work on with Mrs. Hayes when she heard all about our new graphic novel collection. She knew that the graphic novels would fit in great with her ELA class’s learning about the parts of a story. So we came up with a plan to use the iPads to make some great comics.

We started off by doing some dramatic interpretations of Elephant & Piggie books by Mo Willems to demonstrate the use of dialogue and speech bubbles to tell a story. Then Mrs. D’Elia spent some more time over the next few days introducing students to the graphic novels in our collection and exploring graphic novels on the web site The Professor Garfield TOON Book Reader.  We learned new storytelling features such as panels, speech bubbles, and facial expressions. After discussing the parts of a story, students started to develop their comic strips which would include characters, a setting, a problem, and a solution to the problem. At first we thought we would simplify things by making the comic strips limited to 4 panels, but the students had so much to write that we let them choose their number of panels.

After outlining their ideas and then creating rough drafts on paper, we got to create our pictures on the iPad. The art tool of choice at Pine Glen is Drawing Pad, an excellent Elementary-level art creation tool, and one of our Core iPad Apps. Our art teacher, Miss Fallon, was on hand to help the students realize their vision of what they wanted in their panels, making sure they had good details but still left room for the speech bubbles.

Once students created their panels, it was time to make them into comics! We used the Strip Designer app on the iPad to choose our page layouts and add speech bubbles and sound effects. You can see the completed comic book embedded below.

Pine Glen Graphic Novel Issue 1