Ancient Mythology Graphic Novels @dwyerteacher

I do not believe in reinventing the wheel in regards to teaching, though I do think that teachers should take a critical look at the resources they are using and adapt those ideas and activities to meet the diverse needs of their own class. With that in mind, I took this idea for a unit on Graphic Novels and Mythology from It’s Critical! Classroom Strategies for Promoting Critical and Creative Comprehension by David Booth. More specifically, the idea came from Ernest A. in Toronto, who I had the privilege of working with when I was a student teacher. He was a great

mentor and I hope I do this unit some justice.

That being said, the

recursive and dynamic process of teaching, learning and knowing can never produce the same unit twice. not follow them religiously.

These steps are a basic outline, do

Adapt and change as you go.

I have broken up the description of this unit into steps, though it was not that strict when I was going through the progression. We continually jumped around, skipped, and re-worked several of these steps depending on need. For the sake of simplicity, I will just write out the steps, and if you choose to use this unit, change it any way you see fit.

Step One – Introduction to Myths To kick this unit off, I had several website prepared for the students to read through. I also had several books on hand in class for those you prefer that method. The books were Daularies’ Book of Greek Myths, History Dudes Vikings, and Egyptian Gods and Goddess. The websites were also fantastic; they appear to be from a teacher named Mr. Donn, and he had tons of information on Egypt, Rome and Greece. http://egypt.mrdonn.org/gods.html http://greece.mrdonn.org/myths.html http://rome.mrdonn.org/gods.html

Next, I gave them a free period to search through the websites and books and find a god/story/myth that interested them. After that, as a class we shared some of our favorite stories and had a discussion about what made them interesting, or why we would want to retell them in graphic novel form. What about this story is particularly visual?

Then, to finish

up the class they have to make a handout that showed their gods name, the culture of origin, and then summarize the story they would tell in one sentence. They also had to draw an image of how they imagined the god to look, or download an image from online that they wanted to base their representation on.

With the choices made, we now had a focal point for the rest of the unit. I think letting them choose the god first gives everything we did from here on out a bit of perspective. Later on, when we discuss the characteristics of Myths, they will be an expert on their own myth and can refer to that and learn from their peers. Step Two – The First Telling of your Story For the next portion of the unit, we took our original choice and began to tell the story. I chose to do this as a wordless story, though not necessarily as a graphic novel. They had free range to chose anyway to tell the story they wanted, the only constraint was that they could not use words. Some chose flowcharts, other chose traditional boxes and comics. We used The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, as a way to investigate

what a wordless story was and how to structure it. Great book, highly recommended.

Next, with an idea of what a wordless story looks like, we got to work researching our myth, by fitting the story into three simple categories; beginning, middle and end. Later on in the unit we will use this diagnostic work to study what the structure of a story is, and get more into plot detailing. For now, I wanted to introduce the idea, but not go into details. Once the research was complete, they got to work telling the story. We used simple pencil drawings on white paper, though they had complete creative control of how it looked. I believe this was an important part of it, since the summative task would be more structured, I felt it was important to give them control of this portion. The stories were wonderfully done, and I was pleased with the hard work that went into them. Some students rushed them by got the main points, while others were perfectionists and had to minutely work on every detail.

Finally, to finish of this portion of the activity, we exchanged stories in a carousel and made inferences about what was happening in each of them. It was a great way for each student to learn about a wide array of myths, and a good opportunity to share their work. After this, each student explained their stories with the class and we talked about how close or far off our inferences were in a journal reflection.

It also gave the

students a chance to self-edit their work by gauging how much, or how little, the reader understood. Step Three - Detailing our Work For this step, we took a step back from our myth and took a larger look at the subject and asked some big questions. This was the bulk of the unit and encompassed most of our time and instruction. It was also, in my opinion, where the most learning took place, even though it was undoubtedly not the students favorite aspect of the unit (the actual drawing and writing of their graphic novel was) it was the most beneficial for them. We looked at the following big ideas: What is a myth? What is the writer’s process? How do graphic artists use the writer’s process? What are the elements of a story? What are the characteristics of a graphic novel? How do authors plot their stories? What is the difference between a narrator and a narrative? How do we write dialogue? What is so important about sequencing?

To determine was a myth was, we read several myths online and made an anchor chart of their characteristics. We found that myths are stories that try and explain how the world works, usually by focusing on supernatural aspects of the culture. They show gods and goddess as mortals and each has a specific message, or value, that is it attempting to evoke in the reader (or listener, since they were mostly passed on in the oral tradition). We then made a list of the characteristics of Graphic Novels, looked at how art depicts the theme (and did a couple of drawing activities to help this idea) and a couple of lessons on speech bubbles and how to use them. For each of these aspects, we made anchor charts and began surrounding ourselves with the rules and lore of both myths and graphic texts. Our classroom was slowly turning into a museum of pictures, words and images.

The next thing we did was look at writing specifics. We determined what our big idea was (what was the moral or theme of the story) and looked at some other stories and what their themes are. It was important here to determine the difference between subject and theme. The subject of the story is cursory to what you want the reader to take away from it. I wanted the focus of this project to be about the big idea, and wanted the kids to not get lost in the details of their stories. Once we finished our understanding of what a graphic text was and how to determine the big idea, we moved onto the Elements of a story. We

started with Plot. I gave them several main events of a story and they had to put them in the order that they felt made the most sense. With this base set, we looked at how we can categorize different parts of a story. This scaffolded them nicely to the elements of Plot; Exposition, Rising Events, Climax, Falling Action, and Conclusion. We made our own definitions for these terms and placed them up on the wall (well actually the ceiling right above our desks). To reinforce these terms, I read several picture books and had the students make a plot graphic organizer about each one. We saw that every book does these steps differently; and possibly in different orders, but that each component exists for all stories. Once we reached this understanding, I set them to work on their own story, and they began to plot it out. For this, they filled out the same graphic organizer that they had been using for the storybooks, but really we could use anything at this point.

After this we looked at how our Setting and Characters will influence our work. These were quite easily understood, but we went through a great website I found about the elements of Cinderalla. It helped them to think about their own stories and to see how simple it is to create a rich and deep story. By focusing on all of these aspects, we give more depth to our work, and the reader will enjoy it more. http://www.learner.org/interactives/story/ The next step was a look at what is a narrator, and what is a narrative. I wanted the students to stay away from a narrator, and try and tell their

story through the narrative of the pictures and dialogue. This included some writing practice on the how to write dialogue to move the story along, and what are the traps that we may fall into. We deconstructed how a graphic novel can tell you a story on two levels, through the pictures and the words. If possible, how do we get our point across in pictures, thus saving space on our page and not making our story word-heavy. This was not an easy concept to grasp, but they saw the importance of keeping our dialogue and words brief and to the point. We realized that there is no need to describe the scene in detail, as the picture will do that for you. The words give a sense of what the characters are thinking, their motivations, feelings and opinions. Thus, the words we use in our story should be for character development. I think when framed this way, it made sense for them, and gave them some much needed structure to work with. Step Four – Storyboards With the basics of the components of a story in place, we began the arduous process of mapping out our own Myth. This consisted of mostly two aspects; spacial sense and organizational skills. The spatial sense aspect came into play in the manner of organizing how the novel moved. Some Graphic Novels were linear in nature and followed a straight line, while others were more abstract. One student was telling the story of Crete and the Minotaur, so he felt it would be more natural if the story moved like a maze. Each box zig-zagged around the page, and the reader had to follow the story using their own intuition and understanding. This was a fantastic idea that I encouraged him to run with. However, it required a lot of planning and spatial sense to make it happen. They only had one B3 sheet of paper, so he had to make sure that his rough copy was well organized. The first thing we did was draw the boxes exactly the same as our good copy would look, thus creating a template. Once this was in place, we wrote – in words, not pictures – what would go into each box; what was happening, the gist of the dialogue,

and a brief description of the drawing (for example, Odin sees the Well of Wisdom and is amazed – low angle). With this long task finished, we were ready to get to work.

Step Five – Making Connections However, before we started our good copy, I wanted us to make a minute or two and think about Myth, and how it relates to the current world. We used a Venn diagram to compare our Myth to a book we had read as a class (most chose Artemis Fowl, or The Man Who Walked Between the Towers). I hope by doing this quick exercise, they realized that Myths are eternal, and as each generation puts their own meaning into a story, the story changes. One student made the connection that Theseus and the Minotaur could have been about heroism and bravery at one point in history, but for later generations it could be seen as a political tale of oppression. This step is one that we could spend weeks dissecting, but is something that the students will relate back to throughout the year.

Step Six – My Graphic Novel The last step was the simplest from an instructional point of view, as all the hard work and background detail had already been filled in. I gave them markers, rulers, pencil crayons, and paper they got to work. They used some great problem solving to finish this. I felt I had provided enough, so I stood back and let them figure out their own problems. I only interjected when they were at an absolute standstill, and that only happened once. Great work team!