Fruit Boy and Veggie Girl

One of the best things about Writing Club is being able to follow the children's own interests.

The character 'Fruit Boy' was born out of a simple word-association warm-up exercise. The child who came up with Fruit Boy instantly felt he'd created something with potential, and the rest of the group picked up on that energy and asked could they all write stories about Fruit Boy and his pal Veggie Girl.

Some people might dismiss comic strips as an easy, frivolous type of writing, but strip cartoons are quite demanding to create, as well as being a respected narrative format. I often mention to the students Art Speigelman's graphic novel 'Maus' which won the Pulitzer Prize for its powerful depiction of wartime Germany, (although many of the images inside are not suitable for KS2 so I am careful which pages I show). 

This week in Writing Club I've given the children a whole session just to plan their story in 7 frames. That's a task in itself - any professional author will tell you how hard it is to write a synopsis. Next week the difficulty will be to communicate each stage of the story in one or two speech bubbles per frame plus a caption. The writing will have to be extremely spare. Children who find writing daunting will therefore feel the task is accessible, while more confident pupils will find themselves stretched.

I used the free downloadable comic strip frames here: Picklebums. I then enlarged them to A3 size for ease of use and to give a bit more elbow room.

So watch out next week for the nail-biting adventures of Fruit Boy!