Over the last eight weeks, the Year 2/3 students have created their own comic books
Our comic book creation was integrated between English, Design and Technology, and Art. The inspiration for the plot was our English narrative model text ‘The Mango that Spoke’, a story about a farmer who goes to pick a mango and the mango talks to him, then his dog, a fish, and finally a goat. We began by internalising the model text and ensuring we knew it off by heart. Then we had a go at writing a story of our own, substituting the characters, settings, and an unusual event for our own ideas, while retaining the overall plot. We had a lot of help with the editing and improving of our story. Then we wrote independently, following the same plot and doing our own editing.
In Art, we began studying comic books as an art form. We learnt about the colour techniques comic book artists use – complementary colours, contrasting colours, and tonal colours to create a mood or feeling within a frame. We discovered the process of turning our ideas into a comic, planning each frame and the dialogue of our characters.
The second step of our process was to partner with another student and decide whose independent narrative we would use as the basis of the comic. There was a lot of collaboration and turn-taking involved as we worked together on planning, drawing, and colouring our comics. Some groups even created small biographies about themselves as authors to go in the back of their comics!
We were so excited to share our finished comics with some of the other classes. We spent our last Art session going from class to class telling them how we had made our comics and reading them to others. We were thrilled to have the support of the other students and their encouragement of our hard work. The collaborative work and the sharing of our creations helped us to foster community within our class and with the wider school community – we celebrated the innovations and spurred one another on in the use of the gifts that God has given us.
