What Do Cartoons Have To Do With School?

I have found a fun and interesting way to teach story writing, dialogue and a little bit about insects through the creation of cartoons!

CAUTION: This is a work in progress!

FACIAL EXPRESSION

• we explored how our faces can show emotion - we focused on our eyebrows, mouth and eyes
• we played a little game of "Facial Charades" to really get us into it!
• using MS Word, I created a table with 36 boxes, each of which we filled with an expression and a description
• I used the handout from Cartoon Connections for ideas!
• we next moved into speech bubbles and symbols

INSECTS AND EXPRESSION

• as we were learning about insects in science, we learned about how to draw a spider
• we practiced putting different facial expressions on it and talked about what it could be saying
• students then created a single panel cartoon using a spider and a speech bubble
• it was fun to teach about the parts of a spider through drawing
• we then did the same for other insects

CONVERSATION

• next we talked about dialogue
• we looked at examples of cartoons and talked about what we noticed
• we talked about how important it is for one character to talk and another character to respond
• students were put into pairs with four large blank faces and speech bubbles
• students came up with a setting and dialogue for their characters and drew expressions to go with the dialogue
• this was great and the kids kind of wrote a "mini" tory without realizing it!