Catching Up & Comic Books

CATCHING UP:

This week our students finished their sock monsters rather than having sketchbook time. All of the students worked really well in finishing the sewing, decorating, and writing of their description of the monsters. The turned out really well. We did however, have a little bit of a time issue at this point. This is something we've encountered more than once. How can we tell a student that they need to finish the project they're working on because we need to move on to the next lesson or next part of the lesson? I don't want to rush a student, but at the same time we can't spend unlimited amounts of time on one project.

While some students were taking a little extra time on their sock monsters we had 2 different learning centers set up for the students. After our Model Magic fiasco I was a little bit hesitant about allowing the students freedom to explore while Stephanie and I helped with sewing and gluing. One of our learning centers utilized the plastic toys provided by Tina. I was really shocked and relieved when I looked over and saw the students working so well.

COMIC BOOKS:

To begin our lesson on comic books we took some advice from Matt and Genevieve and took some extra steps in talking about the parts of a story. I started out with asking the students what they know about the parts of a story and then filled in the blanks that they left out. During this little lecture I also had the students help me to create a hypothetical story by filling in the Beginning, Middle, End, Problem, and Solution together. This was my way of making sure the students fully understood the parts of a story. During this lecture we also talked about the what makes a comic book different than a story book. We showed the students examples of comic books and they flipped through and pointed out things they noticed. I think allowing them to look at the examples of comic books helped us in having a richer discussion about stories and comic books. They really got into it.

After the class discussion the students were given large papers with the parts of the story we just talked about. This served as their rough drafts of their comic books. While the students worked independently I did manage to over hear some great conversations between students sharing what their comic books are going to be about.