Comic Life Lesson Plan

A few weeks ago, I talked about the two classes I am taking in my county. I couldn't get the lesson plans to come into blogger the way I wanted then, but I think I have it figured out now. Here's the language arts lesson I created for Comic Life:

Unit/Lesson Title: Story Structure/Main Idea

Step 1: Desired Results
What important concepts, content, skills, or vocabulary will students learn in this unit? In other words, what should students KNOW by the end of this unit?
Students should know how to plot out and organize a story and understand setting, theme, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

What should students UNDERSTAND and be able TO DO by the end of the unit?
Students will understand the importance of planning and organizing their stories before beginning the writing process. By the end of the lesson, they will have completed their story.

What SOLs or competencies are addressed in the unit? Are there any cross-curricular links we can make?
Reading 8.5b, 8.5c, 7.5a, 6.4a

Step 2: Assessment of Understanding
How will you assess student learning?
Students will need to complete both parts of the comic series to receive full credit for their work. They will also need to have the setting, theme, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution for both parts and have them clearly identified in the correct place. Students will be graded on content, not artistry.

Step 3: Learning Plan
Learning Sequence:
Hook/introduction:
Students will be introduced to the concept of story structure and plot. To better help them understand this concept they will be creating a short comic series on story structure. This comic series should involve characters describing what rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution are and how the students are going to setup their own story. The next part of the comic series will have the characters describing the student’s plot points about a story they will be writing.

List instructional sequence and timeline:
1. The teacher will introduce the concepts of story structure and plot.

2. The teacher will give students a printed storyboard from one of the panels in Comic Life.
Students will fill this out for both parts of the comic series and turn in for teacher approval.
However, students will work on this one part at a time. They will need to complete the first
part on the story structure devices before writing their stories. Once the teacher has given
approval, students will be ready to fill out their panels in Comic Life.

3. Once in the computer lab, students will be introduced to Comic Life and its features.
Students will then begin filling out the story structure panel from the storyboard they created on the first part of this series only.

4. Once the students understand this concept, they can then begin working on their stories
using this structure. They will again fill out a storyboard around the characters
describing the important points of their story and then return to the computer lab to
complete their comic series.

5. Once their comic series is complete they will move on to writing and completing their
stories.

6. Students will be able to share their completed comic series with their classmates.

Comic Life and Moodle

I have my next two assignments due soon for those PDS courses I am taking. This week, I am creating a lesson plan for Comic Life for Language Arts. I am thinking a short comic series on plot structure would be interesting to try. In my lesson plan, I have students creating characters that explain what plot structure is, making sure that students know understand the concepts before they start writing. Students should be able to have their characters explain rising action, conflict, falling action, and resolution. Once the students have done a storyboard and created this comic, they can move on to creating another plot structure and comic on their story. Again, their characters will be explaining the various plot points of their story and then the students can complete their stories.

In my online facilitator course in Moodle, I am creating an online professional development session on using Excel Spreadsheets in the classroom. This is similar to the practicum I did in graduate school, but I want to be able to go further with it. I learned a lot from that experience and realized that there were some things missing and I want to go back and have teachers know how to fully use Excel to their advantage. Some of that will time spent on graphing and more interactivity assignments.

Both assignments are due in the middle of the week, so I will be busy! I still need to come up with a rubric for my Comic Life lesson. I will also be attending a PDS session on using podcasts with macs tomorrow, which will be new for me. The last time I used a mac before this year, podcasts hadn't even been invented yet! I am quite comfortable using the PC software for podcasting, but I need to know how to use it on the macs for when our mac carts come in.