4th Grade Comic Book Covers

Never fear. 4th Grade superheroes are here! I hosted a student teacher earlier this school year and he was really into comics. He invested a lot of himself in this lesson and it was the best lesson he wrote. 

Students started by brainstorming ideas for their superheroes (or villains). They then got to practice some heroic figure drawing using their classmates as models. This really helped students understand proportions better. They then went on to create their final comic book cover using a title and logo for the character. The final work was painted with watercolor. These turned out very nice. 

4th Grade Comic Strips

Detail from the comic above. This guy
has such a cool, dry sense of humor. 

Let me start by saying that this project took forever. Since I took a couple weeks of paternity leave a while back, I thought that comics would be a good project for my students to work on while the sub was here. I had visions of being able to finish it in a week or two after I got back. Those visions were apparently more like hallucinations!

My students were so into this project that some wanted to spend months on it! I ended up calling it last week. The projects that are still unfinished will go into student folders to be worked on whenever they have free time. I had so many kids that really got into the writing and drawing for this project that they weren't even able to have time to add color even though we spent six 45 minute classes on the project. So many of the comics are extremely clever and quite funny.  

I'm not going to post a full lesson plan here because this is pretty basic. I had kids brainstorm story and character ideas before doing some sketches of their character. They then drew out their comic, using the first panel for the title. They then went over their drawing with a small sharpie before adding color with colored pencils. Pretty simple and a lot of fun!