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"My favorite is American Symbols. I like how you show what the Statue of Liberty stands for." Bennett, South Carolina fifth-grader |
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Posts Tagged ‘Chester the Crab’
Artist becomes the Editor!
Written on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 [permanent link]
I’m back in Richmond this week doing artist-in-residency work with 4th graders for the arts organization Young Audiences! This is my third school year of helping elementary students become authors over these 5-part workshops.
When I was in 4th grade I was copying “Peanuts” comic strips out of the newspaper, line by line. By 5th grade I was making my own little chicken-scratch comix by folding a regular piece of typing paper in half and drawing with an over-the-counter black felt pen. My Dad copied the original for me, and I sold the black and white copies to my friends for 25 cents.
I like helping the students today do MORE than I did. I push them to really structure their ideas and practice them through three full versions of their stories (a text rough draft, a thumbnail sketch version and a finished, colored version) — I sure didn’t do multiple drafts when I was drawing “Dyno-Man and the Army of Justice!!” The good news is that their ideas are worth that work. Today I edited stories about Harriet Tubman and John Henry building a freedom railroad to the MOON and about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington arguing about where to have lunch!
Tags: arts in education, Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, comic book, graphic novel, Richmond Public Schools
Posted in Author's Purpose, History Teacher | No Comments »
Class Project: ROUGH DRAFTS!!
Written on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 [permanent link]Be a part of my next book!! As your students work on their writing skills, I’d love to have them practice by editing ME. I’m posting more and more on my website about the author’s choices I make, and I’ve just added some rough draft pages from my upcoming book about World War I.
http://www.chestercomix.com/rough-drafts/
The rough drafts are the second step in my Creative Trail. (The first is research – When I pick a topic, I love the hunt for information I will use to tell the story the way I want to tell it.) I hope that inviting students into this second step with me will excite them about the creative process. Teachers can print these rough draft pages and give them to students to review and correct. Now, for once, the students get to be the editor! I’d love to get feedback from teachers and students via email or via a snail mail return of the pages, marked in red or green or purple or whatever color the students want to use to mark their suggestions.
I will take all suggestions into consideration before making my final author’s choices on these pages. Classes who make real contributions to this story will get signed copies of the final book!
Tags: author's choice, Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, creative process, World War I
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New state standards matches for Chester Comix
Written on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 [permanent link]See how my 27 comix match up with North Carolina’s social studies standards! http://www.chestercomix.com/standards-nc/
The background:
Chester the Crab was born in 1995 as a narrator for a short series of Earth Day comic strips in the Daily Press newspaper. He and I goofed around for a few years after that tackling such important subjects as: Which came first, crunchy or creamy peanut butter? But in 1999 the testing wave hitting the public schools was growing so big that the newspaper noticed and called together a roundtable of teachers to ask what we could do to help them.
“Make Chester tell stories linked to the state standards!”
I drew five years of Chester adventures with a pen in my right hand and the thick state standards document in my left. I built my stories from the ground up to cover the classroom material (key words in bold, timeline across the top of every page, lotsa maps . . .). Virginia’s Standards of Learning are pretty detailed, so it didn’t surprise me to find that most of my stories met standards in other states as well.
When I launched the Chester Comix business in 2003 to put his adventures in book form, I printed teacher’s guides with the matching standards on the back. But it wasn’t a great system: I couldn’t fit every state onto that list, and when a state tweaked its standards my printed list went out of date.
Now, finally, that idea has moved to this website. Click on the state standards box in the menu bar above and you’ll see a map of the U.S. Click on your state and see a grid of that state’s social studies curriculum and how Chester Comix can help teach it! Please let me know if I’m missing an important detail, or if you think other Chester titles apply. We can edit these grids as the classroom reality changes!
(PS – creamy peanut butter came first)
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, North Carolina, state standards, Virginia Standards of Learning
Posted in History Teacher | No Comments »
