A lot of teachers love to join Genki English themes together into plays & stories, especially at the end of term. Ninja Tip: In fact there are several dozen of these on the VIP forum.
I also know lots of teachers are wanting extra reading practice for when their kids have finished the Genki Phonics.
Trevor, one of the very cool teachers from Southern Japan, has taken both these ideas one huge step further and come up with his very own, pretty amazing Genki English comics!
They’ve been working great for his kids, and he’d love to get *your* feedback on them so he’s very kindly let me share them with you all here.
Do let us know what you think in the comments and you never know it might persuade him to make some more! 🙂
Be genki,
Richard
P.S. Although the language is similar to the early Genki English themes the kids must have gone through the Genki Phonics first, otherwise you’re just going to kill their reading age!
P.P.S. Trevor pretty much got into the rhyming thing as you can tell. 🙂
Earn More From Your Passion For Teaching English!
This is wonderful!! What a great idea, my kids will love this! Thanks! More, more, more!! 😀
LOVE! Great job Trevor!!! So simple and cute and a great way to revise. (First day of class is today, but now I can’t wait until we learn phonics!)
These are great!! The kids would go crazy over these!!!
Way to go!!!!
This is awesome! Thank you so much.
Wow, amazing work.
Thanks for sharing.
Now, what is your suggestion when and how to use them?
the thing is, that I do GE first for 1-2 years so the kids are through pretty many topics at this point>>then we start reading and go very slowly spending 2 years on GE phonics.
So I guess it would be a bit of “First readers” after finishing GE altogether (software and Phonics).
I imagine they would work great for repetition and mini play s each lesson in groups.
How about adding some little space in the last field for writing:
eg: Do you like Goldfish?
What is your favorite pet?
etc.
Fantastic 🙂
Thanks for the positive comments from everyone.
In response to Margit’s question and suggestion;
I designed these comics to be used after Genki Phonics.
The experts seem to agree, for independent reading, learners need to already know about 98% of the vocabulary in the text they are reading and they also need to understand the grammatical patterns.
It’s difficult to find books that meet this requirement, so I decided to make these comics with each series roughly based on several levels of Genki English.
I hope students will enjoy reading them, and also understand what they are reading.
I also plan to make a worksheet for each story. The worksheets will have a range of comprehension, writing and discussion type activities. I actually made some of these but then changed the stories, so I want to make sure the stories are OK first before I re-make them.
As for using the stories, the main goal is reading practice, but of course it recycles and connects a lot of what they have learned and because it is mostly dialogue you could easily do skits, role plays etc..
Suggestions for stories and activities are welcome.
Trevor. These comics are fantastic. Excellent for consolidation of lessons learned in a fun and kid friendly manner. Well done mate!!!
These are brilliant! Just what I’m looking for to help motivate reading skills. My students are going to love them as we’ve already completed the phonics program.
🙂
Waiting to download these! Just the concept has me excited. The Genki Phonics stories are brilliant for working on kids phonetic reading and comprehension skills but younger kids crave pictures. This idea has been in my head for some time, but I just don’t have the time to create something like this right now. Thanks for this! I’m sure it will be super!
Definitely love it! “Genki-devotees” need more material!. Keep at it! Trevor, what else can I say to convince you that, that’s the way to go, what with your talent and all….
Monica,
Thanks for the flattery.
When I find some time I will work on some more, and probably worksheets to go with them.
I have absolutely no graphic design skills (that may be obvious to some people), but I’m using a program called Comic Life that is very easy to use and pretty cheap.
It’s good for making comics like the ones I made and it works really well with photo’s too. ie put in a photo and add captions etc..
I tried one of these with my kids this week and they absolutely LOVED it!!!!! I also made sure it was printed in color and that was like the total “wow” effect for them!
Further on, you may consider making blank copies of these so the kids can fill in the dialogues themselves!
Thanks for the awesome experience!
I’m very happy to hear your kids like the comic.
Blank bubbles for dictation and writing practice was one of the ideas I had for the comics when I started making them.
But do this I had to make the bubbles big enough for young kids hand writing and that meant that the stories I have on one page now were up to 4 pages long.
So I need to think about the best ways to add writing practice.