Of getting into the world of Comic Strips

Teaching teens is a great experience; one thing I really appreciate is that they are not yet adults, with formed opinions and preconceptions; but they are old enough to think for themselves.

However, treating teens as adults all the time can be tiring, on me and them. 

So, getting inspiration from the date we are celebrating (today is Children's Day in Brazil, and it happens to be a long weekend) I decided to have a new approach: I encouraged them to get in touch with their childish side!

How did I achieve it? Comic strips!

I love comics, as most adults do. But when it comes to making comics, it is fun beyond our years!

So I started off by planning a story: they would write a story about someone who wanted something they didn't have. Can you guess the target language of this lesson? Yep, second conditional and subjunctive structures with I wish.

We planned the narrative together in class; after planning, drafting and imagining the comic, we went to the tech part of the class: create a comic strip on the computer, using Strip Generator.

First they watched a tutorial to learn how to create a comic the way they want, then they started working together, in pairs, developing their comic.

In this lesson, I encouraged collaboration, as one pair helped the other; communication, as they were talking to each other on Google Classroom; their creativity, as they could make their comic freely, only using their imagination.

After they created their comic strip, they actually published their comic online, as well as shared the link to their comic with each other, and they could give each other some feedback on their work.

What surprised me was that they were happy to have created a "real" comic; I reminded them, puzzled, that we had made a comic strip before; and they said that they had only drawn on paper with crayons, and that was not the same thing as publishing an online comic! What made them happy was to get a feel on getting published, on having a global audience to their comic.

By broadening their audience, I accomplished to make the lesson authentic, and learning was much more organic and fluid.

And I humbly have to say, I did not plan for this. All I wanted was for them to have some fun and get a chance to practice the target language. 

But in the end, I got so much more!

So next time I plan a lesson, the audience is certainly something to keep in mind to work in my favor.