Comic strips can be a great way to bond with your child and fill up some time on a rainy day. In this article, we’ll go over how you can start creating comic strips with your kids.
How Can a Comic Strip Enrich Your Child’s Learning?
Comic strips are a fun and engaging way to encourage your child to express themselves artistically and emotionally. For young children with less ability to express themselves, drawing out their experiences in the third person in a comic strip format can help them to process emotion, learn through play and be creative. The comic strip format is timeless and provides endless possibilities, allowing your child to have complete creative freedom. If your child is struggling at school with their language or socially, having them draw out their experiences and frustrations can be a great way to help you understand what they are going through and can help them to learn to be more empathetic.
Brainstorming
The first step to creating any comic strip is to brainstorm with your child what you want the comic to be about. It could be anything from a completely fictional fantasy adventure to what happened at school that day. They could make strips detailing their family life, but make it more exciting by replacing certain people with mythical creatures. It’s important to let your child be as expressive and creative as they want, as this will help them to enjoy the process more.
Digital Comic Strips
If your child is a little older, comic strips can still be a great way to keep them entertained, but you might want to consider choosing a different format. Online comic creators such as Rage Maker allow your child to create quick, easy and funny strips, without having to spend a lot of time drawing out characters; instead, they can focus on the story a little more.
Hand Drawn Comic Strips
Hand drawn comic strips are the classic type of comic strip and are best to do with younger kids as they can help to keep them entertained for longer and gives them something more practical to do with their hands. You can put a lot of effort in, or very little at all, and still, come out with a great result. If you’re looking to make something to put up on a wall, for example, it might be best to buy some stiff card and draw boxes onto it with a ruler, and then have your child fill in the boxes with whatever they want.
Remember to Color Code
Color coding can be a great way to help your child express their emotions and empathize. Once they’ve drawn out the characters in their strip, help them by assigning certain emotions to certain colors, and then they can fill in each character with whatever emotion they think they might have felt at the time. This is a particularly useful activity to try when your kid has had an incident or problem at school, as it can help them to process the event and understand how the other party felt.
If you are looking for a new activity to try with your kids, why not give comic strip making a go!
The idea of entertaining the child to a comic strip is really useful to enhance their creativity. I think it can trigger the artist inside of them. Who knows they might be an illustrator, a painter, or a writer someday just because of that activity. I usually spend time with my niece making comic strips too. She does not know how to draw. She does the storyline and I do the illustrations. We both enjoy it.
This is such a cool idea! I have no idea it could be done easily. Love getting the kids to be creative and to think outside the box. And this little exercise is a great way to get them to practise their narrative in small snippets.