3rd Grade Mali Comics

Third graders at Varina Elementary have been learning about the Empire of Mali (SOL3.2), so today students in Ms. Galvin’s class created comics about Mali using StoryboardThat. First we reviewed what they learned, and I wrote a word bank on the board: Africa, empire, Mali, gold, salt, trade, route, pilgrimage, Mansa Musa, Sundiata, Niger River, griot, Timbuktu, Sahara, etc. Next, we went to StoryboardThat, and I showed them how to search in the Scenes for background images that look like Mali. We compared the images from the American southwest desert with the ones of the Sahara Desert so they wouldn’t pick the wrong kind of desert. Next we searched the Characters for people that looked like the people of ancient Mali. I did a Google image search to show them how the people really dressed. I also demonstrated how to customize the characters by changing their skin colors and poses. Finally we added speech bubbles from the Textables, and students wrote complete sentences with facts about Mali. Since our students cannot have accounts (they are under 13), we saved our comics by taking screenshots using the Snipping Tool. Then we uploaded them to a shared Google folder so we could read each others’ comics. You can take a look at all of them here.