Posts Tagged ‘transportation’

New Teachers Guides are here!

Written on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 [permanent link]

The teachers guide for the Moving and Grooving comic book about transportation is now on the website! You can find it by clicking the blue button on the homepage that says “Free Teachers Guides” or by going to the section that has sample pages for all the books (if it’s available online, the teachers guide for each book is through a link at the bottom of the list of page titles). Please let me know what you think of it. For future guides, I’d love to know what is most helpful to the education you practice and what other features you’d like to add to Chester Comix teachers guides.

The teachers guides for Civil War vol. 1 and Civil War vol. 2 are also here now. I’ve finished handing out the printed versions of those, so now you can get all those activities, literacy lessons and quizzes in the free .pdf file for them posted in the Free Teachers Guides section. As I run through the printed guides, I’ll make that content available here as a free download!

And in a few weeks I’ll have a teachers guide up for this month’s new comic, “Revolutionary City.” Stay tuned!

Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, Civil War, classroom activity, history education, literacy lesson, practice quiz, teachers guide, transportation
Posted in History Teacher | 2 Comments »

Moving and Grooving!

Written on Monday, January 26th, 2009 [permanent link]

There’s a new Chester Comic! Check in the MY COMIX area off the homepage to go to the area where you can see two sample pages and get a good sense of what each page covers in this grand race across hundreds of miles and hundreds of centuries! It is an attempt to give today’s kids a sense of how transportation has changed over time. This book is full of races, jokes and pounding hoofbeats. This book fits well into the social studies concept books I’ve already done: “Comix Economix,””American Symbols,” and “GOVERNMENT.” (And if you check out my new order form, you’ll see you can buy just one copy of each of those four, if you’d like.)

The cover joke this time is the never-bef0re-seen Chestermobile! This mean machine is 1940s Batmobile + Chester logo + my own PT Cruiser + googly Chester eyes I always thought would look good on an aqua VW Beetle . . .

The first chapter of the book has Chester and his friend Christie racing not only across the land but through time as well. As they go, jumping from one form of transportation to another, they gradually find themselves swallowed up into the modern sprawl we now call THE MEGALOPOLIS!!!! Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!

In the second chapter, I shift gears. Instead of showing a race across the land and through time, I give Chester and his friend Tamara different tasks that carry them just across the land in 1902. What transportation carries them the fastest? How complicated is it to get from one place to another back then? You get the answers on the way to the story punchline — a Teddy Roosevelt moose joke!

The third chapter is about the Wright Brothers. As is typical of Chester pages, there’s a LOT going on in this one. For example, on one page you get an action shot of a German daredevil falling to his demise, you get the Wrights, you get a plug for library research and then you get the science of wing lift. THEN you get a pop culture reference to a song by a Canadian pop rock band from around 1980! WHEW!

The last chapter is about the growth of our road system into the Interstate Highway system we take for granted today.

I hope “Moving and Grooving” travels to your shelves soon. Let me know what you think!

Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, comic book, graphic novel, highway, history, Moving and Grooving, social studies, transportation, Wright Brothers
Posted in History Teacher | No Comments »