Birdley in the Classroom

A top student of mine from last year stopped by and encouraged me to introduce Birdleys to other teachers. "Tell them to use the Birdleys," she said, "because they're GOOD." Perhaps it was the visual aspect, but it may also have been that we read the comics aloud alot, which helped get students get involved and remember the comics. This post will mainly introduce a few techniques I use in having students read the comics aloud.

Usually in my classes (grades 6 through 10, typically) I have had students volunteer to read the Birdley comics. Typically they don't need encouragement, but today I introduced it by saying "I need a few Hollywood actors to read the comic." This helped to draw in a few kids who may not otherwise volunteer.
Prior to the reading, I tell all the students, who have a copy of the comic in front of them, to read the comic and highlight key science words during the dramatic reading. The words may be properties, verbs, units, or anything else that I consider important. Sometimes the actors need a primer on what to read, so I go up to the actors and make sure they know their parts. I typically have them stay in their seats but they could also read in front of the class. I've found it's important to smooth things over if a kid makes mistakes, or especially if I make a mistake. As we read it, I also point to kids to cue them on their parts. Students have been pretty flexible about their parts - guys are often willing to play female birds. After the comic, I will ask them a few questions to spark discussion and then give them clues for answering the study questions, which I typically put on the back of the comic. Other resources, such as backgrounds, graphic organizers, and visual exercises, come into play as well during the unit.
If you have any strategies for implementing comics in the classroom, feel free to post a comment or send me an e-mail.

M&Ms

It is Friday again, and what a great week it has been. A busy week, as you can tell by the eclectic title. Much has been accomplished both with classes and with Birdley book 9. Hang in there, earth science teachers, a couple Birdley Earth books should be coming soon. I've heard a few requests for the new link to the Birdley site and the link to the home page is the same as before: http://www.birdleymedia.com/. The other pages are different, though, so you may need to re-bookmark any that you have bookmarked. Especially useful to educators should be the "Elsewhere" section, which has a lot of cool links on microbiology, marine biology, astronomy, and other sciences. The "microbial soup" blog also has a few meditations on microbes that might serve as fun facts for a class with some bio in it.
Back in the classroom, the main thing in physical science this week has been teaching my students the scientific method by completing a week-long lab activity with them on M&Ms. Sure we peppered it with a quiz there and a comic there, but M&Ms were the main thing. Students in a group of 2 or 3 opened a bag of M&Ms in groups and sorted them by color. Upon quantifying the M&Ms, they made a bar graph illustrating the number of M&Ms for each color. On the second day they then converted them to percentages to construct a pie graph... and finally on the third day we averaged all the group data to achieve a class data set.
Today we checked back to see that we had all of our data and then set about to create comics on the scientific method. Many great characters were created, such as the Evil Pie Chart, the Mad Mouse, and Bahama Llama. The kids had to illustrate a science experiment while outlining the steps of the scientific method. To model the work, I improvised one of these comics on the spot using the overhead. Taking their ideas and putting them up there was a highlight for me - I underestimated the amount of fun you can have with an overhead. To guide their work they also had a rubric which called for the required elements:
-steps of the scientific method
-2-3 pieces of lab eqipment
-one data chart
-clear pictures and explanations.
We used a basic six panel template that I did up in Microsoft Word. I emphasize that you don't have to consider yourself an artist - clear stick figures are cool as well. If you try something like this, let me know how it works out for you.