Moustache Potatoes Comic Club

On the recommendation of my Twitter friend @mrs_hyde I recently read a book called Boy Writers: Reclaiming their voices.  I loved this book.  As the mother of two boys who don't particularly enjoy writing I was fascinated by Ralph Fletcher's look at a writing classroom from a boy's perspective.  The book looks at the things that motivate boys to write.  It talks about the fact that some boys like to use violence in their stories, that they like zany or bathroom humour, and that they like to incorporate pictures in their stories.  We need to acknowledge these things in order to engage them.  

A few years ago I ran a comic club for a term (the Angry Pencils), mostly because I had a student who loved to make comic books and I wanted to give him more ideas.  I had a good turnout, and almost all of the club was boys, but I didn't continue with it as I had other projects to keep me busy.  After reading Boy Writers I decided that I should restart my comic club in order to try to reach some of our reluctant boy writers.

We now have sixteen Year 6 students in the club.  Seven are girls, which is a lot higher than the last time I ran it, but many have come from the Ninja Readers (our book club).  I am pleased that after the first week three more boys turned up, brought along by their friends (I must be doing something right!).

If you're interested in running your own comic club, I'll post what I've been doing every couple of weeks or so.  I'm not a cartoonist or artist myself so I'm using a lot of YouTube experts and books to inspire the kids.  We meet at morning tea so time is limited.  In a way I'm running a flipped model club because we watch a couple of YouTube clips and then I send the students away to practice and watch further clips if they want to by accessing the comic club page on the school website.

Here is what we've done so far:

Week One

• Generated ideas for a name.  A vote ended in a tie between "Moustache Pencils" and "Potato Quest" and they combined the two to come up with "Moustache Potatoes".
• Outlined a plan for the next few weeks.  In order to draw a good comic strip we need to have characters, so first up was learning how to draw a basic cartoon face.  In Week Two the plan was to learn to draw figures and then Week Three is moving on to comic strips.
• Watched a video - Toontorials - Basic Cartoon Face 1.  I encourage the kids to draw while watching the videos I show.
• Character ideas - I put up different eyes, ears, hair, mouths etc that I'd copied from drawing/comic books.  We talked about mixing and matching different features to come up with different characters.
• Facial expressions - I put up a page with different expressions and we talked about using expressions to help make your characters come to life and act for you.
• Website - I showed them the comic club page on the website with the extra videos on it and also the QR code that they could scan if they wanted to watch the videos on the library's iPads during lunch.  The extra videos on the website for Week One are "Toontorials - Basic Cartoon Face 2" and "How to draw 20 different emotions".
• Books - I showed them some of the library's cartoon and drawing books and also pointed out that you can get good ideas from reading our graphic novels.

Week Two

• We looked at drawings that students had made
• Stick figures - we watched a YouTube video about how to make a basic stick figure body and use body language to make it act for us.
• I showed examples of stick figures and body language from the book "Adventures in Cartooning".  This is a fantastic book by the way, I highly recommend it.  There is a series of them but the first one is the best.
• The extra videos on the website for drawing figures are: "How to draw a person pt:1", "How to draw a person pt:2" and "How to draw figures: How to draw people figures".  The first two show a more advanced way to draw figures and the last one is a professional animator talking about how to draw male and female bodies (proportions only, don't worry it's suitable for kids!).
• As the long weekend was coming up I suggested they might enjoy having a go on www.drawastickman.com and doing a fun drawing exercise suggested in "Drawing Comics Lab" (p.25).
• Finally we watched a video by Dav Pilkey, author of the hugely popular Captain Underpants series.  He talks about his inspirations for "Super Diaper Baby 2 - The Invasion of the Potty Snatchers".  

Update:  I didn't manage to post about this every couple of weeks so here is the link to my other post about the Moustache Potatoes Comic Club.

How to Create your own Digital Signage - For free

About a year ago my principal came to me and asked if there was some way we could put weekly notices for the school on our website and on the TV in the office.  Although we have now gone with a professional digital signage provider at that point we were interested in doing it with no cost.  I also wanted to make it easy for our team leaders to write up the notices for their team without too much involvement from me - I have better things to do!  Fortunately I had just been to an EduCamp and the way they use Google Presentations to let participants share ideas was fresh in my mind.  Even now, with our professional digital signage, we still use a Google Presentation as an easy way to collaboratively create the weekly notices.

Here is what they look like on our website:

This quickly became the third most popular page on our website (after our home page and newsletter page).  When we recently launched our school app we made sure it had a link to the weekly notices.

In case you are interested in doing something similar, here is how to set it up for yourself, and use it as digital signage (provided you have a TV that can either connect to a webpage or, as in our case, run a slideshow off a USB stick).

First, go into Google Drive and create a new Google Presentation.  Set up the themes how you want them and then share the page (button in top right-hand corner) with the people who will be creating it for you.  Make sure you give them all editing rights.  

At the beginning of each week I make a copy of the previous week's slides (File<Make a copy) and rename it e.g. "Term 4 Week 3 Notices".  Then I share the new slides with our team leaders and give them until the end of the week to fill in their slide.  To make it easier for me to work out whether they have done their slide or not I added the week number in the top right-hand part of the slides. The slide will show the previous week's number until it has been updated by the team leader.

At the end of the week I check that all the slides have been updated and then add them to our school website.  In order to do that I choose File<Publish to the web... and click on the Embed tab.  I change the slide size to custom and change the auto-advance slides to every 5 seconds.  The width I use for our website is 650 px.  I also tick "start slideshow as soon as the player loads" and "restart the slideshow after the last slide".  Then I hit "Publish" and "OK" and I copy the HTML code to embed on the weekly notices webpage.

In order to use the weekly notices slides on our office TV I had to turn them into jpg or png files.  Unfortunately Google hasn't made this as easy as it is in Powerpoint.  You need to click on each slide, one at a time, and then File<Download as<PNG image (.png) (or JPEG image (.jpg)).  Once I had all my images I put photos from around the school in between each one so the slideshow had a weekly notice, school photo, weekly notice, school photo etc.  Now that we have the professional digital signage I split the screen to show the weekly notices and photos at the same time.

Finally, I downloaded the images onto a USB stick and inserted that into our TV and chose the slideshow option in the menu.  The procedure probably varies from TV to TV so I'll leave it up to you to work out how to do that one.

And that's all there is to it.  Professional digital signage is not cheap, you have to buy specialist equipment to run it, one for each TV you want to use.  You can do almost the same thing for free (assuming you already have a TV) and it does look really good in the school office.  It is a nice way to showcase what is going on in the school for the week.  Hopefully I've covered everything you need to know.  I'm happy to answer questions if you get stuck.