Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Strip Generator!

Ever wanted to create a comic strip for your students with ease? Now you can! StripGenerator is an online tool that allows you to make comic strips. It's super easy to use and has pre-made characters and objects and even allows you to make your own characters as well! I've never made a comic strip before but I didn't find any difficulty in using this website and I will definitely use it in the future. For someone who isn't a technology wiz, I found the tools on this website to be very straightforward and there are many options to customizing your strips the way that you would like to. The strip I made is called The Family of Mice . In my comic, a family of mice is being chased by a cat. The father then screams out "BOW WOW." After he does this the scared cat runs away frightened. The little mouse then asks his dad "How did you do that?" The father responds "Well son, that's why it's important to learn a second language." In my comic, I'm playing around with a lot of cultural themes that can be adapted to discussions in the classroom. Although this is a comic, it speaks to purposes of why we learn a second language. I could think of a million ways that looking at a comic like this could spark a discussion. We could talk about animal sounds, why the cat was scared, animal roles, why learning a second language is important, and so on. It gives a comedic entrance into a fun discussion. Hopefully because of this fun topic, ESOL students would be more likely to share and laugh about how they felt. One way that I could use this comic is to have students write me a paragraph about either the reasons that they are learning English or maybe have them write me a more in-depth narrative about what is happening in the comic and have them include funny thoughts that either the cat or one of the mice family members are having. Either way, I just see this as a fun conversation or topic starter. By doing an activity like this, I am touching on a few different standards but in particular Standard 2, Language for Literary Response and Expression and Standard 4, Language for Social Interaction stand out to me the most. If I were to focus on Standard 2, I could have students write me the paragraphs as listed before and look at their work afterwards to check comprehension. If I were to focus more on Standard 4 I could have students do an activity where they act out the comic. From this, I would see how they play the characters they are acting out and see how they use language to interact with their peers and play out the comic strip story. Either way, this is a great activity to use in class and I'm glad that I found out about it. Thanks for listening!

1 comment:

  1. Nicely done. You can also use a comic strip generator to have students produce conversations using the vocabulary of the topics you are dealing with in class.