5th Grade Animal Comics
Fifth graders at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about vertebrates and invertebrates (SOL5.5b), so today students in Ms. Hall’s class created comics to help explain the difference between these two types of animals. We used StoryboardThat to create our comics. StoryboardThat is the best webtool around for creating comics because of its huge library of customizable clipart. I’ve used often in lessons (you can search my blog for other examples). The only problem with using it at the elementary level is that its terms of service specify that only students 13 years of age or older can have accounts. So we don’t let our students create accounts, but they can still make comics using the free version, then we save them by taking screenshots. First we created our three scenes (the free version is limited to 3 or 6 scenes). I explained that the first scene needed to be an introduction, the second scene would be about vertebrates, and the last scene would be about invertebrates. The students had to plan out which animals they were going to focus on so they could chose appropriate habitats for the backgrounds. A cool new feature on StoryboardThat allows you to customize the background scene by changing the weather and the time of day (click the blue “Edit Scene” button). Next the students added characters and animals (click the Characters tab at the top, then choose the Animals submenu). You can customize the characters as well by clicking the “Edit Pose” button. Finally we added speech bubbles, called “Textables” here, and typed complete sentences explaining the differences between vertebrates and invertebrates. I showed them how to take a screenshot of their finished comics using the Snipping Tool (or Command+Shift+4 on a Mac), and we shared them on Google classroom. You can see all their comics here.