Transcript

For this activity I actually decided to bring the comics into the classroom. It actually started off by getting my students to read at home, and I said "how many of you all read the newspaper?" And they were like "hmmm". I said "the newspaper has so many interesting things in it," I said "what about the comics". And I started mentioning some of the comics that were in the newspaper, they were not familiar with comics in the newspaper. 

So I brought some in. First I put it in my library, and it was on the magazine rack, and they absolutely loved the comics. So I said that worked for reading, let me try it for writing. So I said "what is a comic?" And they said "something that's funny and it makes you laugh." I said, "and you know when you read something and it makes you laugh you can also write something and it also makes you laugh."

I brought in journal writings then, and I decided to get them to write something, just a silly or funny story. So every month they wrote a silly or funny story. It was all dealing with the comics. For Thanksgiving it was a silly Thanksgiving story. For Christmas it may have been a silly Christmas story, same for Valentine's day. 

Here, it was a Halloween story. And I actually gave them a prompt for this one. The prompt for this one was, what would happen if you came to school on Monday morning and there were bats all over your school? And that was their prompt, I said "what would you do, what would the teachers do, how would you react?" And so I sent them back to their seats and they just began to write. There are actually some really, really funny stories up here, but I noticed that it brought out a lot of their character, a lot of their personalities, which I don't see in their regular writing. I don't get a chance to see that in their anchor writing. But comics are interesting. 

They're fourth graders. Fourth grades like funny, silly things, and they were able to be as silly as they wanted to, so I noticed a lot of personality in their writings, and I thought that bringing the comics in was a great way to get them to start to free write and express themselves in a different way.