visuals for story telling

[zellturtle]

I remember back in highschool when I was studying Spanish our teacher had copies of what looked like really simple cartoon strip without words. We had to fill a certain amount of time, 3 minutes or so, telling the story we saw. First we had 30 seconds to make some notes, and were encouraged to use advanced sentence structures. This same format was later on the AP exam.

I would love to do something similar with my oldest English students, but I don't know where to get the materials. I've been googling for cartoon strips but the content is really out there. what i need is just simple every day story lines that my students' vocabulary can support.

any ideas??

thanks!!

[Sally Olsen]

Could you pose your students in a story line and take pictures? They can make up story lines for each other if you put them in teams. They can write down the story but keep it secret and see what other teams make of their pictures. If they can't think of a story line they can act out the story in an English song.

There is a great Canadian cartoon called "For Better or Worse" which deals with every day situations. It is on-line and you could print out some of those and take out the dialogue with white out before you copy it for the students.

[Tanuki]

I agree with Sally

Try things like:

Garfield

Peanuts

Archie

Dilbert

Spawn

(Okay, maybe not the last one! )

Failing that, there is a book called something like "101 Pictures for Teachers" or something straight-forward and obvious. It's basically just stick figure drawings so that ANYONE can draw them up on the board.

You could get a copy of that and assemble a half dozen or so that you think make a fairly predictable storyline around whatever grammar point and/or lexical set you wanted to focus on/review...

...then draw em up and away ya go!

And as they get more proficient at the task, start assembling quite oblique and random pictures. This will push them to fill in the details between frames, thereby calling on their creativity (a good one for motivation and engagement--as long as it's too hard, in which case it will have exactly the opposite effect), and result in a lot of really good language output.

Which you then, of course, "harvest" and use as the focus for the next activity and have them write it all down and learn it!

Hope that helps,
Tanuki

[Tanuki]

Oh, I almost forgot!

Tried and true: magazine ads and photos accompanying articles!

1. Just collect a bunch of magazines that your local hair salon is going to throw away

2. Go through one lazy, rainy, Sunday afternoon and clip out all the pictures--particularly of the boring everyday stuff like someone sitting at a coffee shop.

3. Get some of that glue in an aerosol can (and a mask!) and then stick them to cardboard.

4. Take the sheets of cardboard to class and ask your students to cut out, say, FIVE pictures that they like (don't tell them why or they'll take all day!).

Ask them to cut them out nicely so that there is, say, about a 1cm border around them. (Ha ha! Presto! You just saved yourself that job, didn't you? No, you won't get the whole batch done in one sitting, but after doing the activity a few times with a few different classes, well, before long they'll all be nicely cut out for you! Yay!)

5. Keep em in a file.

6. When you want to do this activity, lay the cards out on the floor (face down once students get savvy to the exercise) and give them a 10 second time limit to choose X-number of cards.

7. They then make stories (either individually at higher levels) or in groups.

8. You do whatever follow-up work you intended to do--and the stuff that you hadn't intended to do, but which came up in the course of doing the activity.

The end.

[Sheila Collins]

I use "Calvin And Hobbes" with my 11-year-olds: you may have to sort through the strips to find ones which suit your needs, but the illustrations are generally broad enough to accommodate a varied vocabulary.