A couple of weeks ago I was approached by the Principal Teacher of RE, who wanted her S2 class to investigate some of the miracles accredited to the shrine at Lourdes.
After a quick online search, I suggested we focus on the story of Jean-Pierre Bely, a man apparently cured of Multiple Sclerosis during a Lourdes pilgrimage.
The investigation was organised into two halves: we gave pupils one of four different articles about Lourdes and Jean-Pierre and asked them to underline the most important points. When they were feeding back to the rest of the class, one half of each pair would read out some information, and other would add it to a mindmap on the SmartBoard as keywords (with lots of help).
The second part was to organise the story into sections, give each child or pair a section, and ask them to turn the story into a comic strip. In theory each section become one frame of the comic, although pupils could choose to split their paper into smaller sections if they so chose.
So how did it go?
Well, it was confusing. I find pupils much more giggly in RE than in any other subject, so focus was a bit of an issue during the first lesson.
This morning, we had the second part of the exercise. We handed out the parts of the story, explained what was required, discussed the use of stick people (for ease of drawing), told the class it would be displayed in the classroom - it was all sorted. Unfortunately, I hadn’t foreseen a major problem:
they didn’t know what a comic strip looked like.
!!!!
Not having a working Smartboard, I couldn’t just find an online example, and most of the graphic novels are in fiction chaos. Eventually, I managed to demonstrate what we meant, but it led to all kinds of interesting issues:
what size should each element of the drawing be?
how do you tell stick people apart?
how do you know how big to make your speech bubbles?
what’s a speech bubble?
I could continue. But the most interesting issue this week was their vastly improved focus.
It also led to discussions between myself and the teacher about visual clues, Flickr, Comic Life, plagiarism, copyright, Curriculum for Excellence and how lost I am without my SmartBoard.