Charles Wright third graders have been spending their time somewhere in the vast expanse between history and tall tales.  They emerged with a remarkable set of legends, featuring all the necessary heroes, villains and supernatural events.  Now those legends are reaching an even wider audience as the authors are presenting their stories for all to read in comic book form on the internet. 

“The project of studying the genre of legends and writing their own original legend was already a planned portion of the curriculum, and I thought it would be fun to mix the comic genre and the legend genre into a project where they could learn about both and have the opportunity to be creative,” explains Kelly Lyons, the Lower and Middle School Computer Specialist. 

Click here to read all the comic legends produced by the third class.

Third grade teachers Deanne Trummert and Jon Flies guided their students through the process of first writing their legends and then story boarding their comic.  “The students found props to use to illustrate their stories,” explains Lyons.  “They designed and built background scenes, some very elaborate, and staged their pictures.  Then we took digital pictures of their set and they took the pictures and put them into the ComicLife software program and then added the narrative and speech to tell the story.” 

Lyons was surprised to find that many students were not aware of all the structural elements of a comic book like the difference between a speech and a thought bubble, or the role of narration along the comic strip.  The project also stretched the students’ creativity.

“In many instances, the stories called for characters to be flying,” says Lyons.  “The students had to problem solve to figure out how to get the effect of movement into a still image.  One student had a story about how a fish got fins, and after finishing his story, he realized that the fish had fins in all the pictures, even the ones from before he was supposed to get them, so he took the photos into an editing program and erased the fins from the early pictures to make his story more authentic.  He did an excellent job finding a creative way to fix the pictures instead of starting all over with new pictures.”

The project also gave students an opportunity to learn a lot about a new software program.  “It is difficult to teach a person how to use a piece of software,” explains Lyons.  “Most things are learned almost by accident as a person plays around with it.  Since the students were having so much fun creating their comic, they were more willing to explore the program and learn more about it.  Many of the comics include effects that the students found on their own without my teaching them how to use it.”