First graders at Trevvett Elementary have been learning about Jamestown in History (SOL 1.1c, 1.2a, 1.3abc). This is a new SOL for first grade (it is also taught in 4th grade), so many teachers are eager for new ideas. Today, I showed Ms. Burnett’s class how to use StoryboardThat to create Jamestown comics. We visited the site and clicked the “Create” button. The default comic has three panels, which was perfect since the students need to know three important people from Jamestown: Powhatan, Pocahontas, and Christopher Newport. First, we clicked Scenes > US History to find backgrounds relating to Jamestown. After the students added the scenes to each frame, they clicked Characters > 1600s to 1800s and added people who looked like Jamestown colonists and Powhatan Indians. Then we clicked Textables to add speech bubbles to each person. First graders are learning how to write complete sentences with capitals, punctuation, and correct spelling (1.13), so we practiced those skills as we typed in the speech bubbles. I encouraged the students to include facts about Jamestown in their sentences. Finally, we published our comics and shared the links on Schoology. You can see some examples here. (UPDATE: In Math, 1st graders are are learning about place value, so we did a similar Jamestown comic with another class, but this time the characters talked about place value).
