When I taught English in Elementary schools in Japan I created lots of games and teaching materials. The 6 graders’ last project was a simple self-introduction. Seeing that students were always doing self-intro I wanted to change the formula a bit. Instead of doing a presentation on themselves they would have to design an original comic book character and present it. Their character would be inserted in a “fill the blanks” comic book. In this comic the character Eedzio would ask simple questions based on the material covered for the presentation.
Like a Manga, this comic is read from right to left.
The project was divided into 4 steps.
- Character design: The students had to design at least 5 characters and chose their favorite. I heavily recommended a simple design.
- Character sheet: Once they chose a character the rest of the work was to translate their information into English. I tried to make it as streamlined as possible since most students didn’t have any English writing skills at the time.
- Comic: When they finished the goal of the lesson, like finish up to letter “H”, they could fill in the empty frames in the comic.
- Presentation: Towards the end of the project the students had to present their character to the whole class. They used the presentation worksheet since students had to change from the 1st person singular to the 3rd person singular pronoun when presenting their character.
Here’s an example comic of one my best student:
Some students really gave a good laugh and surprised me with their original characters.
