Teaching Resources
This is just the beginning of what we hope will become the heart of the new Drawing Words & Writing Pictures site. We will begin by posting new lesson plans and syllabi regularly, with standards alignment for teachers who use them. At the moment, we’ve got our informal syllabi up here, but check back soon. All new material will also appear in the blog, so add that to your RSS reader, and you’ll be notified when we post anything of interest.
We’d love to have feedback on this section as it develops, we want to make it as useful to teachers as possible. Please write us with comments and suggestions at dwandwp@gmail.com
In the future, look for new features like reading guides to comics, a book club, and more.
Making Comics
This section is for materials that cover making comics as an integrated process: one person doing both words and pictures. Ideas and lesson plans for different grade levels will be filed under this header.Writing Comics
This section is for materials that cover writing comics as a separate endeavor, either for working collaboratively, or simply for skill-focused learning. Since writing comics is in some ways inextricable from the drawing (at least conceptually), we will include exercises and lesson plans that use basic drawing as a part of the writing as well as word-only approaches. Ideas and lesson plans for different grade levels will be filed under this header.Drawing Comics
This section is for materials that cover drawing for comics as an independent process, for collaborative work, or simply for skill-focused learning. In some cases, lesson plans that contain some work purely on drawing will be tagged to show up here. The drawing elements can be excerpted. Ideas and lesson plans for different grade levels will be filed under this header.Reading Comics
This section is for materials that cover the skill necessary to read comics closely. We'll have exercises that teach those skill specifically as well as various study guides and reading guides for existing comics. Ideas and lesson plans for different grade levels will be filed under this header.Lesson Plan & Syllabus Terminology
Lecture/discussion. This is a section you'll want to present verbally to your class, and allow for questions and answers.
Review. This is a quick verbal overview of an idea by you.
Lecture/demo. In this case, you'll want to have materials on hand to show students the technique in question. You may want to demo the technique and then walk students through it themselves as you circulate and make corrections.
Activity. This is a hands-on section where students should complete the work in class.
Homework. These sections are for students to take home and complete on their own, away from class.
Critique. Our approach to critique is generally to have students post their work on a wall and then lead an open discussion about it. We often will break down larger classes into small crit groups of 3-5, who discuss their work while the rest of the class continues to work on an activity.
A note on copying and scanning
We often take our students to our school's copy center so that everyone can learn first-hand how to make copies and reductions of their work. Alternately, we have set up a scanner and laptop in class and demonstrated for students how to scan their art. We haven't scheduled anything like this in these syllabi because it is so contingent upon your particular situation. However, we encourage you to make time to do some kind of demo or field trip on these topics with your students during the course of the class.
