To support children to develop their script ideas (see my earlier post about using the Sainbury’s Christmas ad to inspire their pre-unit write here) I love to use online comic generators as a teaching resource.

My favourite is ‘Make Beliefs Comix’.

The children love to get involved and it’s easy to use both on iPad or Windows/Mac. I normally get children to discuss their ideas in pairs, write down initial thoughts and then ask children to break up the different stages of the conversation through the app.

The photo above is an example of a scene created through the app. The children were developing Christmas play ideas to see how we could help reinforce good behaviour and morals through a production. This particular group were experimenting with ideas of how and why a child would lie to their parents and the ethics behind why this would be seen as the wrong thing to do.

Some really great outcomes of this lesson and supported them to see how the character lines should be separated in a script. It could also be used to teach how speech should be separated by inverted commas – not tried this yet but just an idea!

Best of all this app is totally free! Just search ‘Make Beliefs Comix’ on the Apple store or go to this website!

Happy comic making!