The other night I went to an elementary school to do an outreach for their annual Dr. Seuss Pajama Night, and every year I try to give the kids something a little different, and appealing to all age levels. This year I used the handouts from my book, the lesson on the book The Pigeon Needs a Bath by Mo Willems.
I brought this book and other Pigeon books along for parents and kids to read:
The nature of this particular outreach is that I'm set up in a classroom and families are coming in and out all night. So it's not really possible to do a storytime--people would only catch parts of it as they're supposed to hit all the classrooms before the event closes. They usually spend only fifteen minutes with me, so I brought an activity that required very little instruction.
I started out by handing each kid that comes in a copy of my handouts and prompting them with the question: "Do you like comic strips? We're making our own comic strips tonight!"
I also showed them the sample I made (feel free to steal this dialogue and use it if you like it):
The kids loved the cute little aliens and all the varied and dramatic expressions he/she/it makes! They got right to work cutting out the aliens and gluing them to the comic strip layout. Then they got creative with giving their aliens words:
Here are some of their finished comic strips!
It turned out to be the perfect activity for the wide range of skill levels and ages that all these children had. Everybody got something out of it and made something they liked. Everybody loves comic strips!
