5th Grade Cell Comics
Fifth graders in Ms. Payne’s class at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about plant and animal cells (SOL5.5). Today they made a comic book to review the different parts and their functions. The students could chose whether they wanted to illustrate an animal or a plant cell. They started by drawing the cell and its organelles in Pixie. Then they exported it as a PNG file and dragged it into a Comic Life document. Next they used the speech bubbles to make each part of the cell “talk” and describe its function. I stressed to them the importance of writing complete sentences with correct grammar and spelling. Then they did a Google Image search and found a photo of a plant or animal to accompany their cell diagrams. They also used the built-in webcam to take a picture of themselves to add to their comic. I combined all the pages together into one document, saved it as a PDF, and uploaded it to Youblisher. Youblisher is a site like Flipsnack that allows you to upload PDFs and it publishes them as online flipbooks. You can see their finished comic here.