Integrating Popular Cultural Texts in a Fourth-Grade Class

Chapter 3

“Trading Cards to Comic Strips” Xu

Vignette 3.1 of Rachael's class indicates how well her students link popular class teachings in social studies, writing and reading after a unit of popular culture “Dreams to Job's” unit.

This instructor designed lessons for gifted, average, and to varying abilities students within her classroom as they showed no spark of interest or understanding in their “Dreams to Job's” unit. Their culminating activity was to be to write an expository text on creating a business.

The teacher noticed their interest in drawing and comic books so she enlisted the aid of her cartoon animation artist husband to share with her class how he became a cartoon artist. Then they introduced a comic strip that had a theme of “Dreams to Job's” for part of their unit. This lead to interviewing skills, organizing information, and writing information. She followed the steps below in presenting her unit.
Use prior knowledge
Sort the questions
Conduct interviews
Guide the writing
Conduct Research
Write Comic Strips on Starting and Running a Business
Writing an expository text
Writing Personnel Reflections
Child conduct tour of their writing project

The class read www.davpelkey.com about the author of Captain Underpants and this is in the comic strip format. This whetted the children's interest, also.

I feel that this class was delighted and enthused with her modern
presentations using popular cultural text. They were highly motivated to do the work and were able to use the skills they enjoyed using such as drawing and using comic strip ideas. The students were able to use their prior knowledge of careers they were familiar with. Going out into the community and interviewing people was exciting for them also.

They were given a wealth of knowledge so they were able to write about the business they would be interested in creating.