Friday, July 10, 2015

Summer Writing for Teens and Tweens - Comic Fill-in-the-Blanks



To keep tweens and teens on their creative writing toes this summer, try challenging them with a set of fill-in-the-blank comic strips.

I copied some for my children off of Yahoo's comic page to my computer (if you were planning this for a group setting, you would need to get copy write permission).  Then I combined them onto a single sheet in "Paint", and used the eraser to blot out the original captions, so the children could fill in their own words to go with the pictures.


I had planned on saving it for later today, but my older girls (ages 14 and 16) discovered, and filled theirs in, during a late night kitchen raid, last night already.


They got quite a kick out of seeing how their dialogue differed from each others, but still managed to fit with the pictures.


I crammed quite a few comic strips onto one page - fewer strips per page would make for larger word bubbles, and might be easier for slightly younger children to fill in.

It might also be fun to leave the words, and erase the pictures, for the artistically inclined.

Or, for children blocked by empty word bubbles, you might start off with a matching exercise, by cutting out a set of word bubbles for each blank comic strip, so they could mix-and-match the original words with the pictures.

8 comments:

Ticia said...

There's a variation of Garfield called Garfield without Garfield, everyone else is there, but he's not, and it's very weird, but I bet it would work well for this idea, because then you could add in his thought bubbles AND draw your own character.

I LOVE this idea!

Dawn said...

You are just filled to the brim with amazing ideas.
Blessings, Dawn

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

This is SO you - very original. I think my daughter will love it, since she is all about the words and doesn't like to draw...

MaryAnne said...

So clever! I could see my three older kids having a lot of fun with this!

Bethany said...

How fun!

Die fantastischen 5 said...

My first born son learned writing that way (many years ago). It was the only theme he was interested in and we also used Garfield! Have a nice summer!

claireshomeeducation said...

I wonder if I have enough computer skill to pull this off? Maybe I'll ask T because I think this would be well worth a try with my newest little writer. Fun and not too much actual writing. Thanks for sharing.

MissK said...

thanks for letting me discover this page of comics, my oldest loves comic's and especially Garfield, so we'll improve our english :)