Next Monday is Labor Day in the U.S. For most of us it is a three day weekend. It is the traditional "end of summer" in the minds of many of us. If you're planning to answer questions about Labor Day or teach any lessons about it, here are some short videos to add to your list of resources.
Why Do Americans and Canadians Celebrate Labor Day? is a TED-Ed Lesson about the origins of Labor Day. In addition to learning about the origin of Labor Day students can learn a bit about changes in labor regulations over time.
History of the Holidays is a series of videos from History. Each installment explains a different holiday. The Labor Day video is embedded below.
Disclosure: Make Beliefs Comix is a new advertiser on this site.
Creating comics is one of my favorite creativity exercises.When I was a kid I loved flipping through books of Peanuts comics. Unfortunately, I could never draw as well as Charles Schultz. Today, thanks to tools like Make Beliefs Comix, you don’t have to be good at drawing in order to create comics.
In the classroom and in my personal life I’ve always felt that creating a comic is a fun way to illustrate a story and or make a statement. To that end, here are five ways to think about using comics in your classroom this fall.
Express Emotions and Tell Personal Stories
Adults don’t always have the right words to express what they’re feeling and kids definitely don’t have all of the right words. That’s why for years I’ve recommended having kids create comics to express their feelings and tell their stories. Make Beliefs Comix in particular is an excellent platform for students to use to create their own comics to tell their stories. In fact, the founder of Make Beliefs Comix had that in mind when he started creating these comic story starters and this daily comic diary template.
Make Beliefs Comix has a few features that make it a great platform for students to use to create and tell their stories. First, students don’t have to be artists to create their own comics on Make Beliefs Comix. They simply have to select scenes and characters from a large gallery of premade drawings. After doing that students can add dialogue boxes and write their stories. Second, Make Beliefs Comix supports the use of fourteen languages. This makes it a great option for students to write in the language of their choice to tell their stories. Third, students who need a little bit of help starting their stories can avail themselves of the “All About Me” story template available in Make Beliefs Comix.
Practice a New Language
For the new school year Make Beliefs Comix is launching a new feature that enables students and teachers to make audio recordings. (That feature will be available soon). Combined with support for writing in fourteen languages, the audio recording component of Make Beliefs Comix makes a great tool for students to practice writing and speaking in a new language.
Create Historical Fiction
When I taught U.S. History I tried to get my students to think about what life was like for ordinary people during the periods they were studying. Creating historical fiction stories is one way that I attempted to get my students to think about and write about what life was like for people living in the time periods we were studying. For example, I would ask them to think about what daily life was like for the family of an immigrant factory worker during the industrial revolution. One year, after I gave that prompt, a student asked me if he could draw characters for his story. I agreed and it turned out to be my inspiration for future classes to create historical fiction comics.
Tools like Make Beliefs Comix make it possible for anyone to create a comic even if they’re not adept at drawing. Simply pick some characters, a background scene, and speech bubbles from the design menu and then write a story.
Teach Empathy Make Beliefs Comix has an entire section dedicated to SEL (Social Emotional Learning). In that section you will find prompts for creating comics in which students express how they’re feeling and how they feel about what they’re seeing in the world. Additionally, you can have students go beyond making simple comics and complete ebook templates offered by Make Beliefs Comix. Those ebook templates, some of which I’ve featured in the past, are full of prompts for writing about courage, dreams, and joy.
Model Behaviors
As the new school year begins, consider creating your own little comics to illustrate the behaviors that you want students to practice in your classroom. Print them out and place them in your classroom. These could be comics about lab safety procedures, how to behave in the lunchroom, or what to do when they hear someone being mean to another student.
Watch this short video (embedded below) to get started making your own comics with Make Beliefs Comix.
Key Make Beliefs Comix Features to Note
Students don’t need email addresses to create on Make Beliefs Comix.
Students can create comics with as few as three frames or as many as eighteen frames.
Make Beliefs Comix offers support for fourteen languages!
Hundreds of writing prompts are available in Make Beliefs Comix.
Last week I wrote about using the BBC's Week in Pictures as a source of current events discussion starters. Following up on that idea, here are some other good places to find current events stories written for kids.
For many years CNN Student News was one of my go-to resources when I was teaching current events courses. Today, CNN Student News is called CNN 10. CNN 10 provides good, short overviews of the previous day's important new stories. A written transcript accompanies every episode.
DOGOnews is a student news site that features articles for K-8 students. DOGOnews covers current events stories in the areas of science, sports, entertainment, and variety of topics that fall under the banner of social studies. Teachers can find stories by browsing the categories, filtering by grade level, or filtering by grade level.
PBS NewsHour Extra is a good site for middle school and high school students. The site offers a searchable database of articles. A searchable database of lesson plans is also available on PBS NewsHour Extra.
When I included current events as a regular part of my social studies classes I would always show a map of where a story takes place. The following websites can provide students with a geographic connection to current and historical news stories.
Newspaper Map is a neat tool for locating and reading newspapers from locations all around the world. Newspaper Map claims to have geolocated 10,000 newspapers. To find a newspaper you can browse the map then click on a placemark to open the link within to read a newspaper. You can also locate newspapers by using the search boxes to locate a newspaper by title or location. Along with links to the newspapers, Newspapers Map provides links to translate the newspapers you find on the map.
The U.S. News Map is a great resource produced by Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia. The U.S. New Map is an archive of American newspapers printed between 1836 and 1964. You can search the archive by entering a keyword or phrase. The results of your search will be displayed on an interactive map. Click on any of the markers on the map and you'll be shown a list of newspaper articles related to your search term. Click on a listed article to read it on the Library of Congress' Chronicling America website.
Applications for Education
Newspaper Map is a good tool for students to use to discover interesting news stories that might not be featured on global sites like CNN or BBC News.
Good morning from Maine where we're getting ready for a weekend of fun. We're planning to go for a little hike and do a little fishing. I hope that you have something fun planned for your weekend as well.
This week I hosted a couple of professional development webinars for schools. If you're interested in having me conduct a webinar for your school, please send me a note (richard at byrne.media) and we'll chat about how we can work together. You can also take a look at my on-demand professional development courses right here.
The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
My YouTube channel has more than 37,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fourteen years.
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This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin and WayBetterSite. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
