Story Number 3

Here is the 3rd (and final) story to our comic unit.
I've already written about how we wrote about inanimate objects, and fairy tales.

I don't have a great title for the third story we wrote.  Even in class when we talked about it I stumbled over what to call it.  I think we called it a comic story, picture story, and the third story.  

What exactly was it?

I found online somewhere (they are saved on my work computer and I'm currently at home but if you want them let me know and I'll make a point of getting them to my home computer) a bunch of pictures that kind of looked like a comic book without any words (see what I'm doing here... because it is a comic unit).  They were super basic pictures and I think on each page there was a series of 6 or 8 frames and they had the option of about 8 or so different "stories" to choose from.  

I didn't do much teaching for this one and basically let them have at it.

I told them to choose whichever series of pictures they wanted and to write a 3 page (same length as their fairy tales) story on it.  They were allowed to add in other things that were outside of the pictures if they needed to.

Luckily, by now I had caught on that they weren't doing an amazing job at editing so while they were working on it I worked my way around the room and sat down and edited their stories with them (sometimes I ran out of time and brought them home though).  I refused to do all the editing work though.  If I couldn't read something (it happened a lot) I circled it. If I thought they needed more description I wrote it in the margins for them to add in.  Paragraphs are a huge issue with these grade 8's and I wrote at the end of a good number of their stories that they had to use a new paragraph for new ideas and for every time a new person spoke (and to please indent them).  I think they are starting to get it.

They were required to add in a bunch of descriptive words by now... I mean we did a whole lesson on descriptive language and they loved sandwich making day!... they knew how to do it.  PLUS, this was all in preparation for our comics.  Where they would be drawing what their characters looked like rather than saying what they looked like "create an image in your readers minds" was also a common comment I wrote.  

Once I edited their work they were required to look over my revisions and add to them.  Then, once again, type out their good copy during all this extra computer time that they have.

Al three of these stories took about 2 months BUT in our defence we missed a bunch of classes due to snow days (and natural gas explosions), extra programing, AND we only see each other every other day.

But we came out of all of it.  It was a busy 2 months and I was more than happy to give them time to write and illustrate some awesome comic books at the end of it!