One-Page Comics

Teaching the one-page comics lesson in March 2022 with second grade, I realized students needed more instruction, so on the second day of the project we co-generated a story with a beginning, middle, and ending.

Starting in high school, a family friend/ art teacher began inviting me to her school’s Festival of the Arts. My go-to lesson is making comics, and in March 2022, I did a four-day lesson with second graders where we planned, penciled, inked, and colored one-page original stories. 

In second grade, students created a rough draft of their comic, using templates and work sheets for low-stakes sketching and brainstorming. 

Most recently, I did one-page comics with high schoolers during my student teaching. It was roughly the same lesson, only compressed to one day and with a bit less modeling on my part. 

High schoolers went straight to final; they penciled, inked, and colored their comics in under 50 minutes. Some of the comics looked rushed, but I thought that the accelerated timetable might help with engagement, not even risking the chance of students getting bored.

The one-page comic went over well with the high schoolers, but I was left wishing we spent more time on the project. I’ll admit, I didn’t have terribly high expectations given the 45 minutes of work time, and that I assumed the lesson was most students’ first experiences with comics, but after seeing what students produced in one day I think they would have done really well with a more decompressed, rigorous version of the project. 

Students were able to choose the subject matter of their comics, which resulted in a lot of interesting stories.