Comics In My Classroom

When beginning to think about lesson planning, it is always stressed that unless students are engaged and attentive to the material being taught, not much will be accomplished. Therefore, comics are becoming very popular in classrooms today as they are very effective at engaging students and helping them comprehend stories. Aside from grasping student attention, comics are very effective tools for struggling readers because they are not extremely text-heavy and they have illustrations which correspond to the little text there is. Also, comics are useful in teaching retelling, which is a concept students continually struggle with especially when it comes time for assessments. Finally, comics really encourage creativity among students which sometimes gets left behind in classrooms with the heavy emphasis on assessments. As the use of comics in the classroom gains attention, more and more resources are becoming available to teach educators about the use of these texts as well as to help teachers incorporate these texts into their core curriculum. To learn more, Comics in the Classroom: 101 Tips, Tools, and Resources for Teachers would be a great place to start. Also, there is a great list of tools for creating comics on the Technology Keys Wiki.